JEN CHU: I loved the idea of
a room just be a bed room-- literally just a
room of a bed. Because it's so small, it can't
really be anything else, and you can't really fit any
other furniture in it, you might as well just make the one
focal piece really pop. I'm Jen Chu. I am an interior decorator and
art director for TV, and this is my 78-square-foot Bedroom
in Brooklyn. I've done art direction for
Project Runway, for the latest Real World in Portland. So I've had the privilege of
working on a lot of things that are sort of like
household names. My bedroom is a 1.5 apartment,
as they say. I live in the 0.5 and
my roommate lives in the one full bedroom. My room is just unusually
small. This is probably the space
that I've designed that reflects my style the most. When it comes to my personal
space, it just makes me want to really pare it down to the
things that I love so I'm not surrounded by too much
extra clutter. I knew from the get-go
that I'd always wanted a canopy bed. And for the longest time, I
thought that your bedroom would have to be huge to
be able to pull it off. But then I realized maybe a
really small room would be able to accommodate one too. This bed is actually one multipurpose piece of furniture. It is not just a bed, but it
also serves as a seat because I sometimes sit with my legs
dangling under the shelf. The bed has trap doors
underneath, where I keep two giant pieces of luggage. The shelving unit is really
essential, I think, to the design of the space. It allows me to display a lot
of the things that I've collected throughout
my travels. One of my favorite things to do
is go through really high end art magazines and rip out
pages of beautiful work and frame them. I know that it's kind of a cheap
way of going about it, but I like that because you can
periodically change things and you don't have to feel so
obligated to feature a piece that you might have spent
a lot of money on. I was looking for drawer pulls
for something else entirely. As I was rummaging through all
the bins, I saw these amazing lion drawer pulls. So I put them in a grid and I
display my earrings on them. I knew from the get-go I
wanted a minimal shade. So I bought a super cheap shade
from Home Depot and I put text on it. I actually cut all the letters
out of black contact paper, and I took a quote out of
Apocalypse Now, which is one of my favorite films. I'm really lucky that I have a
little entry vestibule coming into the room, so I
have a place to store all of my things. It gets dark in the vestibule,
and it gets dark in that corner of the bedroom. And I love the fact that I can
put one lamp that's right in between two rooms and just
pull it back and forth. I think when people come into
my space, usually they say first, oh my god. It's so small. And then secondly they say, it's
actually bigger than I thought it would be based
on the pictures. I think people are surprised
that when you're actually in here, it doesn't feel
claustrophobic all all. It has a really warm, net-like
feeling to it. When I was little, I thought
I wanted to live in an RV. So in a weird way, I think
living in a tiny space is fulfilling a childhood
dream of mine. It did not look like this
when I got here. And I put a lot of
work into it. But I've been really
happy here. They're going to have to drag me
out kicking and screaming. I don't want to move, so
hopefully I'll be able to stay here for a while. -Are you a social
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