Updated: Apr 17

Wow! Look what I found! This was a job I photographed the interiors for a few years back with Doug Stratton. 10-tips-to-upgrade-your-bedroom/

10 Tips To Upgrade Your Bedroom

Chairish

Former Contributor

Feb 27, 2018,11:58am EST

Updated Feb 27, 2018, 12:20pm EST

Your bedroom is one of the most important rooms in your house — and should be a cozy retreat for you to enjoy fully. Whether it's luxurious bedding, soothing color schemes, or unique accent pieces, paying close attention to your design decisions can result in a chic space for rest and relaxation. We invited 10 Dering Hall interior designers to share their take on the best ways to take a bedroom design to the next level.

A cool, blue-themed bedroom.

Eric Piasecki

Use One Color.

"Envelop a room in one color to make it cozy. Here we specified a deep blue color for the walls and a slightly darker tone for the trim for additional definition. I read somewhere that a blue bedroom can lower one’s blood pressure and improve the quality of your sleep. That’s enough to convince me. The soft white lacquered ceiling adds to the dreaminess." — Gideon Mendelson, Mendelson Group, Inc.

A dimly lit and cozy retreat.

Gil Stose Photography

PROMOTED

Be Patient.

"This finished bedroom, with planning and execution, took four months. The nightstands were custom, the wallpaper handmade, the bedframe, furniture, rugs, lighting and accessories took months to arrive from our vendors. Then we had to consider the electrical work, painting, application of the wallcovering, and the installation of the furniture. The takeaway is that a well-done room takes time, planning and patience, but the outcome is worth waiting for." — Douglas Stratton, Stratton Design Group

Getting Featured in a National Publication Like Forbes

Being featured in Forbes, even within a lifestyle or design-focused article rather than a business feature, represents a meaningful level of editorial validation. Forbes maintains high standards for the visual content it publishes, and interior photography selected for inclusion needs to meet a bar that goes well beyond simply showing a nicely decorated room, it needs to feel authoritative, well-composed, and genuinely representative of expert design work.

Collaborating With Interior Designers on Published Work

Projects like this one, photographed in collaboration with interior designer Doug Stratton, highlight how a strong photographer-designer partnership can lead to opportunities neither party might access alone. A designer's strong project needs photography capable of doing it justice, and a photographer's strong images need compelling design to photograph in the first place. When both elements align well, the resulting work becomes a strong candidate for exactly this kind of national feature.

What Makes Bedroom Photography Particularly Demanding

Bedrooms present a specific photographic challenge: they're often smaller and more intimate spaces than living rooms or kitchens, with less flexibility in camera positioning, and they need to convey comfort and calm rather than the more dramatic visual energy that might work well in a great room or entryway. Capturing that sense of restfulness while still showing off the design details, bedding, lighting fixtures, architectural features, requires a more restrained, careful approach than photographing larger, more dramatic spaces.

Why Revisiting Older Published Work Still Matters

Rediscovering a past feature like this one offers a useful opportunity to reflect on how a body of work has grown over the years, and to reconnect with past collaborators whose projects may still be relevant to new prospective clients researching an interior photographer's portfolio and press history today.

The Value of a National Feature for a Design Career

For an interior designer, a Forbes feature carries weight with prospective clients that regional press coverage alone often can't match, particularly for clients researching designers from outside the immediate local market. For a photographer, being the credited image-maker behind that feature adds a similarly valuable credential, one that can be referenced in future pitches to other designers and publications considering a new photography partnership.

Bedroom Design Trends Worth Photographing Well

Bedroom design has evolved considerably over the years, moving toward layered textiles, statement headboards, and a stronger emphasis on creating a genuinely restorative retreat rather than simply a functional sleeping space. Photography that captures these evolving design trends accurately, rather than relying on outdated bedroom photography conventions, helps both the designer and the photographer stay relevant to current reader and client expectations.

Lessons From This Collaboration

Looking back at a successful collaboration like this one offers useful lessons for approaching future designer partnerships: clear communication about the project's editorial potential from the outset, careful attention to which design details deserve the most photographic emphasis, and a shared understanding between designer and photographer about what a publication like Forbes is actually looking for in a feature submission.

Staying Connected to Past Collaborators

Maintaining a relationship with designers like Doug Stratton well beyond a single project often leads to further collaborations and further opportunities for joint editorial features. Treating each successful project as the start of an ongoing professional relationship, rather than a one-time transaction, consistently produces better long-term results for both photographers and designers building their respective careers.

Rediscovering this feature is a good reminder that great work, once published, keeps working long after the fact, opening doors to new conversations years down the road that neither party might have anticipated at the time.

It's also a reminder to keep an organized archive of past press placements, since features like this one can resurface years later as unexpectedly useful proof of a strong professional track record.

Here's to more discoveries like this one, and more collaborations worth celebrating.

Thanks, Doug, for the great work then and now.

Looking forward to what comes next.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy exploring more of the portfolio.

Cheers to many more features ahead.

A Final Thought on Legacy Work

Every photographer builds a body of legacy work over time, projects that continue to represent their skill and style long after the shoot itself has wrapped. Revisiting these older pieces periodically, rather than only ever looking forward to the next assignment, offers a valuable chance to appreciate how far a career has come and to reconnect with the collaborators who helped make that progress possible.