Rustic Bedroom Bedding
by Colson Morgan
Few interior design styles are as time-tested and flexible—not to mention dependably trendy—as rustic and farmhouse style. They are a loose and often overlapping family of design aesthetics. Farmhouse and rustic styles offer broad templates and key decorating sensibilities. Anyone can use them to add some rustic flair to a space, be it an otherwise plain apartment bedroom, a busy suburban living room, a cozy winter cabin, or even an actual farmhouse in the country. Noted fashion designer Ralph Lauren and his wife Ricky adopted a richly historical farmhouse style for their homestead escape nestled in the Colorado mountains. In the Double RL Ranch, they breathed life and warmth into a main lodge. They turned the stand-alone barn into a dining room, and have numerous log cabins spread across the property’s roughly sixteen-thousand acres. The couple even softened the army-surplus decor of their Airstream trailer guesthouse! They used a rustic, canopied wood-plank platform and farmhouse style blankets, proving that rustic charm comes in all shapes and sizes.
Farmhouse and rustic interior design
Farmhouse and rustic are among the most versatile and popular interior design styles today in part because they mix seamlessly with a myriad of other design philosophies. Opportune pairings for farmhouse and rustic include traditional, industrial, cabin/lodge, and boho. You can cultivate a rustic touch in an existing room with carefully chosen throw blankets or rustic bedding sets or use the style as a foundation for decorating an entire home. In this post, we’ll explore the essence of both styles, their shared and unique style aspects. We’ll look at the important role the right bedding plays when decorating shared or personal living spaces, and how comfortable, handmade, and ethically-sourced products from Los Andes can help you achieve your interior design goals.
Rustic Style
Rustic style is an enduring interior design aesthetic characterized by a closeness to nature and simple living. It often has informal but functional layouts, vintage décor, and natural materials. Rustic design is a highly scalable and transferable style for interior decorating; it can be equally dynamic and effective in a modest suburban home or an expansive country homestead like the Dutton Ranch. You don’t need to share your name with an acclaimed fashion industry label or be a professional interior designer to start decorating rustic rooms either; a core tenet of the rustic theme is approachability, and it’s flexible enough to be adapted to your own personal tastes. Whether you’re looking to add some lodge décor to a guest bedroom, choosing a color palette for your cozy log cabin retreat, or just want to bring a unique style to a modern bedroom, the rustic look is a great choice.
A key focus of rustic design is the interplay of natural colors and raw materials. Rustic furniture and décor emphasize complex textures with organic fibers and minimally-treated wood. Rustic furniture tends to be heavy and built to last, so don’t turn your nose up at searching for pieces at garage sales and flea markets, as well as antique shops–wear and patina are part of the appeal. Reclaimed wood ceiling fans, log beds, and exposed beams are all popular fixtures of the modern rustic bedroom. Some pieces of rustic furniture integrate bare twigs or branches into their designs and a rustic cabin aesthetic might include a few decorative pine cones.
Since rustic style is all about making a space feel natural and relaxed, finding the right rustic bedding set is vital. The perfect rustic bedding sets an inviting tone for the whole room, so be sure to balance the dual sensibilities of simplified patterns and rich textures. Keep to a neutral color palette, leaning into natural colors with grey, warm brown, or white bedding. Organic Egyptian cotton or linen sheets paired with solid color comforter sets are a great choice. Remember to complement this simplicity in shape and color with a depth of texture. Decorative pillow shams made with burlap or a natural fiber like jute can add a hint of rustic style ruggedness in a bedroom or living area, especially when paired with the contrasting gentleness of alpaca fleece blankets. With its pure, black and white color scheme, the simple geometric design of our Native Print Black and White Blanket brings out the textured alpaca blend weave, perfect for a touch of repeating pattern without disrupting the understated color palette of a rustic style bedroom. Our Brown Southwestern Queen Blanket is also a great choice on queen size beds.
Farmhouse Style
Farmhouse style is a close cousin of rustic style. This style incorporates many of the aesthetic choices of rustic design, channeling them to evoke the atmosphere of the classic American farmhouse. The farmhouse style template emphasizes functionality and accessibility, with room layouts and décor that are unpretentious and unintrusive to work and play. If your personal tastes favor intimate communal spaces that invite family gatherings and a sensibility where the rough edges of daily life are what make a house a home, farmhouse style is the style for you. Unlike modernist and austere design styles which can be hard to swing for young families with small children or pets, farmhouse style excels at showcasing the lived-in quality of a home as its primary feature. The aesthetic also fits with the trend of shabby-chic; a visit to a furniture swap or your local flea market plus a few coats of DIY paint is all you need for a wide range of décor options to start populating a farmhouse bedroom or common area.
One major distinguishing factor between mainline rustic design and farmhouse style is the latter’s openness to more adventurous designs and color palettes. Traditional rustic style keeps the contours of a room’s furniture simple: thick, blocky table legs and unadorned fixtures. Farmhouse style opens up the rustic theme to more diverse silhouettes and injects a bright flourish of playful hues into the mainstay of neutral colors. Farmhouse bedding might include a jewel-tone duvet cover or quilt sets with western imagery. Remember to keep the color palette of a farmhouse bedroom or common area natural and resist bringing in too many competing colors or artificial tints. Look to the natural world for inspiration in order to maintain strong ties to the farmhouse theme when picking wall colors, furniture sets, and bedding: earthy autumn maroons and golds or rich wildflower azures and purples.
Accompanying the wider color palette provided by farmhouse style comes an opportunity for different patterns and designs, but it’s important not to get carried away. Steer clear of décor and wall hangings that border on the blatant or take the farmhouse inspiration too literally. Committing to the farmhouse vibe too heavily or mixing in too many disparate aesthetics are among the easiest mistakes to make when decorating in this style. Remember: photographs of grazing cattle and embroidered fields of wheat on all your pillows might recall common sights from the homesteads of the eighteenth century that give farmhouse design its aesthetic roots, but they won’t necessarily evoke the homey and rugged warmth the design is known for.
Instead, focus on emphasizing a few quality designs to set the tone in a room. Cabin bedding, rustic bedding sets and alpaca fleece blankets are excellent mediums for adding visual and tactile variety to a queen size mattress in the primary bedroom or guest bedroom. Western bedding looks fantastic on log bed frames and is a great choice in the farmhouse bedroom. Our Native Print Blanket in Fuchsia or Red & Turquoise brings warmth, and can be finished off with some solid color pillow shams. For a higher altitude cabin bedding look, the Mt. Hood Blanket mixes in a touch of lodge style flair with its curtains of pine trees and bold mountain slope design. It also comes in a variety of staple farmhouse-style colors to fit with the room and bedding color palette that matches your personal tastes. The rich chocolate brown and earthy plum options are perfect for a comfortable, reassuring spread in a primary bedroom. Get it in a clear, vivid blue for your guest bedroom to soothe and relax weekend visitors, or opt for the warm red hue to cozy up on the living room couch after a blustery day of hard work or family recreation.
Authentic Decor
In our modern culture of mass-manufacturing, farmhouse and rustic style interior design is a haven for authentic furniture, décor, and bedding textiles. The rustic look avoids the cheap character of products divorced from the value of a personal touch, favoring instead the handmade and the time-tested, the natural and the reclaimed. Just as the modern rustic bedroom pays homage to the mountain lodges, rustic cabins, and rural farmhouses of the past, the elements you choose for establishing your own personal style in a space should have their own histories. At Los Andes, each and every poncho, blanket, and throw carries with it its own story and you can be proud knowing where that journey started. All the products we carry are handcrafted by the skilled artisans of Otavalo, Ecuador. The textiles travel from their place of origin high in the Andes mountains to Los Andes’ base of operation here in Oregon. From there they make their way directly to you when you place an order in our online shop or when you visit us in our Welches store or at one of the great in-person events on our market calendar. Remember, when you welcome one of our alpaca fleece blankets into your home, you also help support the native Otavaleño artisans who crafted them. Authenticity, warmth, and comfort are what the rustic style spirit is all about and at Los Andes, you’ll find them woven into every Ecuador textile blanket.
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