Small bedroom? Make your headboard wider than your bed
When the bedroom is small, most people go for the slimmest headboard they can find, or they skip it and push the bed straight against the wall.
It rarely makes the room feel bigger.
In a HardwareZone thread from November 2024, a homeowner with a tiny room asked if they could remove their 2 to 3 inch headboard to gain a bit of space. The replies were quick and practical: the wall behind your head gets dirty, and bare concrete is not what you want to knock your head on at 2am.
Why a wider headboard makes a small bedroom look bigger
Your eye follows lines. A headboard that stops at the edge of the mattress puts a short block in the middle of the wall, and the bare strips on either side make the wall, and the room, look narrow.
Run the headboard past the bed and you get one long horizontal line instead.
The eye travels along it from one end to the other, so the wall reads as wider. In most HDB and BTO bedrooms the bed wall is the first thing you see when you open the door, which is why this one line does so much work.
What a headboard does that a bare wall can't
Looks are only half of it. A headboard also earns its place every night.
- It keeps hair oil off your wall. Scalp oil and hair products slowly leave a greyish patch on paint right where you lean back to scroll your phone, and once it soaks in, a wipe won't shift it. A headboard takes that contact instead of the wall.
- It softens the midnight bump. Turn over too fast or sit up half asleep and your head meets padding, not concrete.
- It gives you room for lights and power. The bed usually ends up covering the wall socket, which is how you end up with an extension cord snaking across the side table. A wider headboard has space at each end for a reading light and a power point, right where your hand reaches in the dark.
One bedroom, three panels, duck egg blue
A recent client came to us already sure of one thing: they wanted a wide headboard.
We can build a headboard in almost any shape or layout, but they knew exactly what they liked. Three panels, all the same size, sitting side by side.
Equal panels keep your eye moving across the wall. No single panel steals the attention, so the width is what you notice.
The colour
Our client loves a soft, bluish duck egg, so we picked a textured woven fabric in that shade for both the headboard and the storage bed. The weave has a slight nubby feel under your hand, and it looks a little different in morning light than it does at night.
Using one fabric for both pieces matters in a small room. The bed and headboard read as a single piece of furniture rather than two things competing for space.
The proportions
This is the part an off-the-shelf headboard can't do for you, because standard sizes don't know where your window or your wardrobe is.
- Height: we kept the top of the headboard almost level with the window sill. It lines up with something already in the room, so it looks planned instead of floating at a random height.
- Width: wide, but not too wide. There's a wardrobe right beside the bed, and a headboard that ran any further would have blocked its door. We stopped it just shy of the wardrobe door, so the door still swings fully open.
The little extras
The extra width beyond the bed gave us room to build in reading lights and power points at each end of the headboard.
Phones charge right beside the pillow, and the light switches on without anyone climbing out of bed. No extension cords, no cables trailing across the bedside table.
How to size a wide headboard for your bedroom
Get a measuring tape out before you fall for a fabric swatch. These are the checks we run on every headboard we build.
- Measure the whole bed wall, end to end, and mark anything that opens nearby: wardrobe doors, the bedroom door, windows, wall skirting.
- Leave room for every door that swings toward the bed. If a door can't open fully, the headboard is too wide, however good it looks.
- Choose a height that lines up with something, like a window sill
- Decide on reading lights and power points early, after the width is final, so the switches and power outlets sits where your hands actually go.
- Match or coordinate the fabric with your bed base, so the two read as one piece in a tight room.
- Pick a split that suits your taste. One long panel, two, or three equal ones like our client's all work; the width does the visual stretching either way.
FAQs
Do I need a headboard in a small bedroom?
You don't strictly need one, but without it your wall takes the hair oil and the head bumps. In a small room a headboard is also one of the few pieces that can make the space look wider.
Will a wide headboard make my room look smaller?
Usually the opposite. A headboard that runs past the bed creates one long horizontal line, and that makes the wall read as wider than it is.
How wide should a headboard be?
Wider than the bed, and as wide as the wall allows without blocking a door, window or switch. Our client's headboard stops just short of the wardrobe door beside it.
How tall should a headboard be?
Line it up with something already in the room. For this project we took it to just below the window sill height.
Can a headboard have built-in reading lights and power points?
Yes. A wider headboard leaves space at each end for a light and power outlets, so you don't need cables trailing across your bedside table. Our client's three-panel headboard has both built in.