Of the Earth
By Lisa Arnett
August 2025 View more Home
Nature-inspired elements bring an outdated bedroom into the present
Interior designer Madeline Giatras recently met with Naperville empty nesters who found themselves in a very common situation: They’d built their home back in the early 2000s and hadn’t changed a thing since.
“They were thinking, as a lot of parents do when their kids are all grown up and out of the house: Do we want to sell or do we want to stay here?” says Giatras, who grew up in Naperville and founded MDLN Interiors in Chicago in 2024. She recently moved to Bolingbrook near the Naperville border, or “Naperbrook,” as she likes to call it. “[These homeowners] realized they do want to stay here, but they want to go room by room and make it feel more like them.”
Though the kitchen and bathrooms need updating, the homeowners opted to start with their bedroom. “They said, ‘This feels so bad right now when we walk into this room because it feels like a time capsule,’ ” Giatras says. “The size of the room was good, but there was a lot of dead space and bulky, outdated furniture.”
Giatras’s mission was clear: Transform their bedroom into a peaceful oasis for nightly unwinding. “They spend a lot of time in there and love to be in bed for hours before they go to sleep,” she says. “They watch TV, they read, they are on their phones. They also go to a lot of fundraising events, and spend time getting ready in there.”
Giatras balanced clean-cut shapes with organic textures for a vibe she calls “cottage-y but SoCal-inspired.” They kept the original carpet but refreshed everything else, from paint to lighting to furniture. The homeowners were so thrilled with the result that they’re now working with Giatras to convert a loft space into a home office.
1. (Above) To give the wall behind the bed some visual interest, designer Madeline Giatras chose this wallpaper mural by Rebel Walls. “It has this lush forest kind of vibe—it’s a forest of waves. When you walk in, your eye starts from the right and it carries all the way to the left without you even noticing it,” she says. For the walls, trim, and ceiling, she chose Sherwin Williams Drift of Mist. “It has undertones of beige that paired well with the warmer materials and textures throughout,” she says. “I felt that it gave me that light and airy aesthetic, without going too light where it would feel stale. It also read well under different lighting, since there is a good mix of artificial and natural in the space.”
The homeowners liked the idea of keeping a four-poster canopy bed, so Giatras chose this clean-lined black frame with a linen headboard and also added his and hers brass sconces that can be operated separately. Giatras also had a velvet custom storage ottoman made. “I wanted to give them a lot of textures that were really comforting and luxe and soft to the touch,” she says. “The bed is the feature, so we settled on these caramel-y pillows that are velvet, and we all fell in love with these lumbar pillows that have some blue, which is a color they have on the first level of their home.”
Giatras selected nightstands from Crate & Barrel with built-in charging ports. Marble lamps with a brass base complement the sconces and other brass accessories. “They are also really tall, and with the height of this big canopy bed, you want everything to be proportionate,” she says.
2. “I wanted to give them a really big mirror on this side of the room because it reflects the natural light from the opposing window, the light from the sconces, and it also reflects the mural,” Giatras says. She found the artwork on this dresser at Good Roots in Glen Ellyn.
Photos: Jill Tiongco Photography
