The modern, functional bedroom: a smart bedside table by USM [AD]

[AD – This is a paid partnership with USM, the products were loaned for the purposes of this post. Styling and photography: Cate St Hill]

I believe an interior needs to be built on practicality and function, before you even get to the aesthetics and pretty finishing touches that make a house a home. You’ve got to get the foundations right so that a space feels easy and comfortable to be in, so that it can adapt as your needs demand, and so that it can endure as your home grows and changes.

Nowhere is this more true than in the bedroom; a place for rest, calm and quiet. You want a bedroom to be conducive to a peaceful night’s sleep – you don’t want to drift off surrounded by lots of stimulus that gets your brain whirring, or wake up and the first thing you see next to you is a pile of clutter. If we spend a third of our lives sleeping, the bedroom is the one place in the house that needs to be prioritised when it comes to creating a simple, organised home for the everyday. That might mean investing in good quality storage to hide things away, getting the lighting right, making the bedroom inviting with lots of soft linen and natural textiles or developing a few nighttime rituals to help you sleep better.

One place in the bedroom that is the bane of my life is the bedside table. I don’t know what it is but I can never seem to keep my mine tidy; there are piles of books to be read, a number of glasses I always fail to take back downstairs, a dozen lotions and potions, and always a tangle of cables. You can have the most beautiful bedside table but the mundane sight of a multi-plug and several different chargers will just ruin the whole thing.  Now that we’re so connected to technology and are so used to always being switched on, the bedside table has become more than just a surface to rest your coffee cup. It’s a multi-functional tool to help our lives function, from morning to night.

For my third post with USM Swiss furniture manufacturer USM, I’m showing how you can bring a little order and timeless style into your bedroom. A design classic built to last, with a clean, minimalist aesthetic, USM’s Haller system is a modular storage system that can be customised and endlessly configured to reflect the user’s needs and personal style. Chrome tubes cleverly slot together with an innovative ball connector to create the frame, while sheet steel panels in 14 different colours slot into the structure. In my previous post you saw it take form as a stylish grey sideboard with display shelves for magazines and books. But, it can also work for even smaller spaces and pieces of furniture, including here, as a smart bedside table.

This is the USM Haller E bedside table. It has a fold-out compartment with a generous, open storage space below. The appeal is as much from the clean, streamlined form as the clever function of the piece. Concealed within the chrome frame are a series of discreet lighting modules. These Haller E lights fit flush into pre-cut recesses so that they’re almost completely invisible when not in use. Open the door and the sensor-controlled lights magically turn on so that you can see everything easily, even in the dark of evening. You can dim the lights; swapping a brighter light in the morning for a warmer, softer light at night.

But what about all the unsightly cables? The power runs through the structure itself; you simply attach a single connector to one of the Haller e-Balls and that links to the power socket in the wall. The connector can fit onto one of the balls at the back so that the cable can be hidden underneath the frame out of view.

The same Haller E system is used to create an in-built charging outlet. Each lighting slot in the frame can be swapped with e-USB-Chargers. This one has one slotted into the side of the bedside table. So handy and so neat!

You can tailor your smart bedside table to your specific requirements; you could have a large fold out cabinet section if you have plenty of things to hide away, enclose the bottom section with panels to hold books upright, have a series of drawers or one bigger one, or create something lightweight in appearance with glass shelves if pure minimalism is your thing.

The fact that beige is now the colour trend of the moment is purely a coincidence for USM; they rarely add new colours into the range and stick pretty religiously to the 14 tried-and-tested tones in the collection. It just shows that elegant neutral colours will always stand the test of time and come back around again if you wait long enough.

For me, beige is the perfect tone for a simple, relaxed bedroom. Connected to nature, the colour beige – encompassing everything from sandy hues and camel tones to milky creams and biscuit shades – is soothing, tranquil and understated. The word itself comes from the French word for natural, unbleached wool. It makes me think of warm sunny days, deserted beaches or the wind rustling through wheat fields. It feels pure, palette cleansing and, yes, a little bit safe, but isn’t that exactly what you want from a place where you rest and sleep? Maybe an element of blandness is what you need in order to feel restored and find an element of peace and comfort.

So there we have it, a simple, functional design that fits seamlessly into a style of minimalism that is soft, warm and subtly cosy. A design that will both blend into the background as a piece of adaptable storage you use everyday and come to the fore when you style it up with favourite books, objects and a plant or two. And not a tangled cable in sight to detract from that clean, streamlined beauty.