Bed, Better, Best of Both Worlds

MANY OF US have rich, or just lucky, friends who have enough bedrooms that they can devote one to the guest room. One prosperous, hard-working couple I know have an honest-to-goodness guest house. Lovely.

But I’m wagering that most of you are like me and have to make that second or third or even fourth bedroom serve as a guest room and an office and possibly a TV room. I’m loath to set up that room as a “real” bedroom, with fluffy bed and nightstands and reading lamps and boxes of tissues and a nice upholstered arm chair–and then have the bed go unused most of the time while my desk and file cabinets cower in the back corner. So in my case the room is mainly an office, and on the odd occasions when someone comes to stay, the challenge becomes how to clean up my pig sty so my guest can rest serenely at night.

The contributors to Houzz.com, most of them designers who think about these things full-time, or at least a lot of the time, have some suggestions for the likes of me, of us, the multitudes who wish to be hospitable but also have to be practical. Let’s see eight solutions they’ve come up with. None of them speaks to me precisely, but that’s not the point: The idea is to adapt rather than necessarily adopt, merely to capture the spark of an idea, a thought that might otherwise not have occurred. Here goes . . .