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Design Trend: Add a Unique Silhouette to Your Bedroom With a Scalloped Headboard

A scalloped headboard invites both playful colour and structure to your bed’s form and function

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By Kimberley Schoeman  | April 23, 2024 | Trends

When decorating a bedroom, your choice of headboard goes a long way, especially if you are in pursuit of tying together your bedroom’s scheme. Your headboard is not only a solid feature to bring colour and patterns into your bedroom, but a new way to add a unique silhouette to these four corners.

Playful headboards and fun shapes are not reserved for children’s bedrooms for they add both form and function to the bedroom in need of added comfort and structure. A scalloped headboard’s form ebbs and flows from left to right (just like this one from Poetry), adding a tulip-like frame to the top of your bed.

A pinstriped scalloped headboard seen in this home, just 5km from Paternoster. Photography by Elsa Young

We’ve noticed a lot of scalloped headboards making their way into newly-renovated homes, where the bedroom is not only a sanctuary-like setting for relaxation, but a highly-specific expression of personality where creativity is free to fly. With a solid headboard added to your bedroom, consider how often you are likely to sit up with your head resting against it, drinking a morning cup of tea or reading a book.

With that being said, most scalloped headboards are plush and upholstered with bespoke fabrics in either solid colours or whimsical prints, which cover padded foam for added comfort.

Add Colour and Print With Your Headboard

The shape of a scalloped headboard is like a brush stroke of colour and print. This style bring a touch of cool modernity to a room and you can simply prop a pillow behind you for reclining purposes.

Since your bed is often the focal point of the bedroom, it is worth it give your headboard a playful treatment: Try out different heights, fabric features, or employing a trim that will make the entire thing feel more luxurious.

Terracotta tones pared with rich fabrics certainly make for a romantic bedroom, Photograph: Banda Design Studio, Ben Anders

Giving your bed the special treatment to make it a statement piece can be achieved through reupholstering an old headboard with a bright material, dressing your bed with bold linen and scatter cushions, as well as placing art above your head board. Not only are you drawing the eye towards the bed, but you are setting the scene you return to at the end of each day.

How to Fit a Headboard

There are two ways to fit a headboard: Either attach it your bed or attach it to the wall.

It is easier to attach the headboard to your bed, however mounting it to the wall promises no gaps nor a shaky headboard. For headboards joined to your bed, its frame needs to have legs where a cut-out will allow the headboard to easily slot in. Plus, if you are a renter, a headboard attached to the bed is definitely your best bet.

But if you would prefer mounting a headboard to the walls, you will have to visit your nearest hardware shop and pick up French cleat brackets, which you will have to clearly measure and drill into the wall.

A scalloped headboard in a neutral grey suede in the primary bedroom of this Australian home. Photography by Sean Fennessy

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