Lets start with a definition: by duvet cover I mean the thin fabric cover that goes around the big white fluffy blanket that is filled either with down or with synthetic fill.
Duvet covers come in a variety of colors. They are big, the full size of a bed, so by themselves they are a broad expanse of color and pattern. Which might sometimes match the colors of the room, and might otherwise clash.
So here comes the poll for the more style and decorating conscious Dopers.
If it’s a really obviously clashing color from the rest of the stuff, I’d change it up, but if it blends in reasonably well enough, who cares?
In the States, it can be tough to find reasonably priced and interesting duvet covers because it seems like nobody actually uses them. It makes it doubly difficult because I’m a Marimekko kind of gal and Acid Lamp likes muted warm colors in a Manly Ernest Hemingway Joins the Merchant Marines and Picks Up Souvenirs Everywhere kind of way.
You honestly made me snort iced tea with your description of Acid Lamp. Tears running down my cheeks because I know that decorating idea so well.
Response: Response: I just have two covers that I don’t switch between all that often. I don’t go into the patterns much - one’s a solid light blue to match the blues in my room, the other is a dark blue with a white grid pattern.
I buy bed linens with the bedroom’s decor in mind. That is, the spare bedroom is green and white, so I buy sheets and bedspreads with that in mind. Bill’s bedroom is mostly blue. And mine is going to be lavender (right now it’s white) and I buy various shades of purple (all of them clashing spectacularly). I don’t own ANY duvet covers, just blankets and bedspreads. In the summer time, I quite frequently don’t use any blankets, I just sleep with a top sheet on top of me. It’s too damn hot.
Speaking as a Yankee, where bedspreads are more common than duvets. We currently have a cream-colored bedspread (well, it’s put away in another room for the summer). The window treatment is a cornice of the same cream color, bordered in blue. Very plain. HOWEVER, the walls are painted with a sponged pattern so they are what really turns the room from boring to really nice. A bedspread can be pricey if it’s a custom job, and we don’t want to grow to dislike it and wish we hadn’t spent the $$ on it. Throw pillows are cheap.
A duvet cover is, as far as I recall, something that covers the quilt / comfortor, and is therefore not as hard / expensive as a custom bedspread. So I assume those could be affordably swapped out for whatever you liked that week :).
We have practical concerns for our bedlinen, especially whatever’s on top, be it duvet cover, bedspread, sheet, or pile of unfolded laundry… we have pets that are allowed on the bed. anything too delicate gets beat up by claws and nails and besmirched by all the shedding plus the elderly long-haired dog suffering from dingleberries (yuk) and then beat up some more by the frequent laundering in hot water. so I’ve given up on quilts, decorative stitching, and anything that takes very long to dry. what’s left over doesn’t clash too much. I sort of decorate in the long run by sticking to bright or deep solid colors.
and I totally recognize the described masculine style too! snort. with a dash of Anything in Authentic Tartans.
So, all of you that use bedspreads, you make the bed every day, right? And if done right, that means, slinging back the covers in the morning to let night sweat escape, and then put them back and smooth out and tuck in to look nice during the day…
Plus remember, sometimes it’s a clash and sometimes it’s contrast. I for one prefer contrast to what my family calls “department store style”, where every single “cloth or cloth-similar” item in the room matches (upholstery, pillows, rug, curtains, duvet… it’s like that particular pattern exploded into the room!)
I do make the bed every day, yes… well, ok, these last few weekends I’ve just been letting it in the “airing” position, but that’s because I was busy disassembling a room and painting it and putting it back with the furniture in a different position and deciding which minor furniture to get rid of and all that jazz. But normally I do make it, yes, even if I’m by myself. Seeing an unmade bed is like seeing empty yoghurt containers or crumpled up candy wrappers, it just Has To Get Fixed Now.
I don’t think I’d change the room to match the linens… isn’t it generally a lot easier and cheaper to do it the other way around? Plus, my linens come in two kinds:
My bedroom doesn’t have a decor. It has mismatched furniture, disorderly bookshelves and baskets full of unfolded laundry.
You exactly described what I call “matchy-matchy”, which is something I often find a bit abhorrent. At least a lot of department stores are avoiding being too matchy-matchy with things when making dorm-friendly bedlinen kits.
We generally mix and match colors and patterns and get stuff that coordinates well. This means we’ve had an indigo blue quilt, saffron yellow sheets and Roman red all in the same bedroom. It looks great when there’s a simple pattern on two out of the three items, but most of making that work has to do with intensity of color. Your only real goal when doing this is to not end up with pale lavender next to acid green next to brown-orange, as that would not be too awesome.
OOh yes, matchy-matchy, makes me feel like I’m being suffocated. I have white walls and eclectic furnitishings – modern/vintage/retro and mixed patterns, picture styles and colours, so it matters not what colour my duvet is. I can’t bear ‘colour coordination’, possibly in reaction to my parents obsession with ‘cream, with touches of pastel pink and pale green’ they’ve been following slavishly for the past 30 years.
Make the bed every day? HAHAHA! No. I throw the sheet (and blanket if I used it) back over to the other side of the bed. I sleep on one side of a kingsized bed. We bought the bed thinking that we’d both sleep in it, but it turned out that my husband found it very uncomfortable, while I found it wonderful. So he started sleeping in the spare bedroom. My snoring had NOTHING to do with this. Now we have a three bedroom house, and while he has his own bedroom, occasionally he’ll sleep in the spare bedroom. I guess that he just likes to alternate beds.
At any rate, I don’t make my bed every day, just once a week when I change the linens. The rest of the time, I just let the sweat escape whenever I’m not in bed. It’s not like anyone sees my bedroom except me, after all, and I hate to unmake a bed just to crawl into it. And even I don’t see the unmade bed very much. If I’m in my bedroom, I’m generally getting in or out of the bed, or reading in bed. I don’t do much else in there.
Yes, I have about a dozen different duvet sets (matching pillows, sheets etc) so swap them weekly