In the Bedroom, a Restful Style

By CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN

Erin Kunkel for The Wall Street Journal

Niki Leondakis of Kimpton Hotels, prefers bedding with restrained designs, such as simple shams in a guest room in her home.

While many people pay careful attention to the design of their living rooms, Niki Leondakis, president and chief operating officer of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, believes the style of a bedroom is just as important. "It needs to be restful" but also "a reflection of who you are," she says.
Ms. Leondakis sees the bed as the centerpiece of the room, and she likes it to be styled but not overly fussy. "You can save the drama of contrasting colors and energetic patterns" for other rooms, she says.
For her own king-size bed in her Kenwood, Calif., home, Ms. Leondakis chose a duvet that reminds her of two loves—traveling and Asia. The duvet, custom-made by Jim Thompson Fabrics in Thailand, features an abstract Asian-inspired floral pattern in moss green and mushroom. "It's also inspired by our love for the outdoors," she says, noting that the pattern meshes with the view from her bedroom window, allowing the room to blend into the environment.

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Erin Kunkel for The Wall Street Journal

For her bedroom, Ms. Leondakis chose colors that blend with the view outside.

Ms. Leondakis often picks bedding colors that echo a view outside or artwork in the room. One of her guest bedrooms has a view of mountains that change colors at different times of day; the bedding reflects some of those colors. The bed itself, a grand four-poster, was chosen to "reflect the drama of the huge picture window overlooking the mountains," she adds.
Another guest bedroom features a large picture of a hummingbird in flight, and bedding in pale shades of green blends in with the art.
She favors cotton sheets, noting that satin sheets remind her "of water beds or a 1980s bachelor pad." She likes a thread count of at least 200 but cautions that thread counts on their own can be misleading. More important to her are the quality and finish of a sheet: She prefers Egyptian cotton that has a sateen finish "for a softer hand and a lustrous look." She cites Frette as a favorite brand.
If a bedroom is for a couple, it's important to consider both partners' tastes. "Asking a man to sleep in a bed with ruffles and an overly frilly girly look is akin to asking him to wear a shirt that has ruffles and an overly frilly look," she says.

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Erin Kunkel for The Wall Street Journal

A pillow in a different fabric adds texture.

Ms. Leondakis suggests sheets with a subtle tone-on-tone pattern, calling it a "quiet amount of detail." Her bed is made with sheets in a sandy, off-white color that's "very soft on the eye."
While pillows can add personality to a bedroom, "too many pillows is annoying," Ms. Leondakis cautions. She typically has two king-size pillows for sleeping, two pillows with decorative shams, an 18-inch long tubular pillow that offers lumbar support for reading in bed and a 10-inch-by-10-inch accent pillow.
For the tubular pillow, Ms. Leondakis generally picks a fabric that has the same color as the bedcover but offers a different texture—a striped fabric in velvet, for example.

The small accent pillow is meant to add "a little punch," and can be a different color. Sometimes she picks an accent pillow of an unusual shape to "add a fun, playful element." (In Kimpton's nautical-themed Argonaut Hotel in San Francisco, for example, star-shaped pillows are used in some rooms, she notes.)
For a little luxury, Ms. Leondakis likes to send out her sheets to be laundered and pressed so they're "crisp." Another habit: Immediately after she and her husband wake up, one of them makes the bed.
"An unmade bed suggests disorder and chaos, a lack of comfort," she says. And later, "there's nothing better than peeling back the covers of a bed that's nicely made and crawling in."
Write to Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan at cheryl.tan@wsj.com