Furniture for an A-frame room?

February 6, 2007 5:34 AM

Tips for decorating an attic room that's an A-frame?

Upstairs bedroom of an a-frame house i.e. the walls are not straight, but on an angle, from floor to ceiling, 'bout 45 degrees. Can't nail anything in the ceiling/walls, as it's actually the roof of the house.

Are there any sort of special shelves/bookcases/furniture for such a room? Sure we can put in regular furniture, but that leaves a lot of blank space behind the furniture. Any sort of lighting system that sticks to walls as opposed to having to nail or drill in? All suggestions welcome.

posted by Brandon Blatcher to home & garden (8 comments total)

Is it feasible to insulate and drywall the attic? Then you will solve your lighting problem and you can have custom built-in shelves or cabinets to maximize the use of space.
posted by crazycanuck at 6:06 AM on February 6, 2007

What about installing a beam or two across the ceiling? You could use the beam to attach lights, fans, etc.

There are some ordinances regarding living space in the type of attic you describe - you should check it out. My parents and my in-laws both have that type of attic, and both had to wall off part of the angle to pass code. I think they had to do 5 foot high walls on all sides, which took away space, but it was unusable space that no one except a toddler could walk around in anyway, so they built small door into the walls (which still give me nightmares similar to what Karen Black endured in Trilogy of Terror) so that you could store stuff in the angled spaces behind, out of sight. The built walls also give you something to put some furniture against.
posted by iconomy at 6:23 AM on February 6, 2007

Tansu?
posted by BrotherCaine at 6:57 AM on February 6, 2007

I grew up in an A-frame, so our loft was the same style as your bedroom. We had cedar laid up on the walls and big exposed beams, so we didn't really do anything to the /\ walls, just the flat bits on the ends. I'd suggest lamps and the like if you don't want to bolt anything to the walls.
posted by craven_morhead at 6:58 AM on February 6, 2007

Clarification-- It's not an attic room, it's a room in a two story house, so there's no code violations or the like. Insulating and drywalling seems like overkill.

Not gonna add walls as the layout of the room doesn't permit it (windows and doors)

The Tansu link is interesting. Some like stacking box drawers might be good.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:08 AM on February 6, 2007

The bedroom in our old apartment was sort of like this, only we did have "straight" walls about three feet high. We found a few things to be useful - 1) Bed from Ikea. Ikea beds can be put together without a boxspring, instead with wood slats across the bottom of the frame and then the mattress right on top. This made the bed about six inches lower to the 'ground', and therefore easier to be as flush as possible to the wall. (FWIW, my back has improved due to the slats vs. boxspring as well.) 2) Free standing mirror. When we lost the flat space above our dressers, we lost the ability to hang mirrors over them. We found a free standing mirror (again, from Ikea) and were able to angle it in front of one of the windows/flat walls. The mirror made the room look larger, as well as, well, acting as a mirror.

Recently friends of ours bought a house with the same style bedroom as yours. They painted the "ceiling" an amazing midnight blue, and while I'd thought it would make it look small, instead it's so soothing and comforting. So a good paint choice might help too.
posted by librarianamy at 8:34 AM on February 6, 2007

My old house was nothing but slanted walls and weird curves (there were NO right angles in the house at all). Seconding the Ikea suggestion, and the mirrors. If you're worried about the blank walls behind the furniture, a nice curtain or drape can take care of that - nothing too bulky though, or else you'll make the room look much smaller. For bookshelves, I made some cube boxes out of some wood, without tops or bottoms, set them on their sides, and stacked them in different patterns depending on my mood. They're awesome bookshelves, and you can make them as big as you like. I'm sure someone sells them somewhere.
posted by sephira at 10:28 AM on February 6, 2007

My old apartment had an /\ sleeping loft, very low at the sides and lined with some sort of preternaturally hard siding that made hanging anything really difficult. I had a bedside lamp, but I also got two strings of miniature paper lanterns and hung them along the low sides of the room with some very careful staplegunning. It provided lovely ambient light and at least gave the unusable, eight-inch-tall space something to do.

(Paper lanterns might not be your style, but there's a pretty wide variety of lights-on-strings around these days.)
posted by paleography at 3:08 PM on February 6, 2007