Beach-Style Bedside Lamps

A beach-style interior is soothing and serene, whether your home is at the coast or not. Seaside colors, textures, and imagery create the impression of being on vacation. One way to express this coastal aesthetic is through your choice of bedside lamps. What are the best beach-style bedside lamps?

Beach-style bedside lamps have a coastal color palette of neutrals with gentle accent shades. Introduce coastal textures such as sea glass, driftwood, rope, bamboo, and seagrass, and novelty shapes like fish, seashells, lighthouses, or vintage ships’ lanterns.

Bedside lamps are vehicles for your interior design and can certainly be an eye-catching feature. However, the lamp on your nightstand also needs to be functional, providing light for comfortable reading and other activities. Let’s look at the best choices for beach-style bedside lights.

Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Coastal Color Palette

The first way your bedside lamps can reflect a beach-style is through the colors of both the base and shade.

The typical coastal color scheme is based on neutrals like sand, stone, cream, khaki, beige, grey, and white. Layer these delicate shades with gentle pops of accent colors, such as seafoam, aqua, and coral.

If you prefer more nautical shades, choose navy, royal blue, and red as your accent colors, introducing stripes and clean lines.

For a tropical island vibe, add vivid fuschia and green, leafy plants and flowers.

Best Colors For Beach-style Bedside Lampshades

Colored lampshades are an easy way to add a feature color to your bedroom décor, especially if the lights on your nightstand are primarily decorative and not necessary for lighting. Choose a textured linen shade in a bright tone or a lampshade patterned with maps, seashells, or sailing ships for a charming touch.

However, if your lights need to be functional, for instance, for comfortable reading, colorful shades can obscure the light. Instead, choose white or off-white lampshades that allow light through.

Best Colors For Beach-style Bedside Lamp Bases

Your lamp base can be a beautiful feature in your coastal-themed bedroom. For example:

A stone ceramic base will look clean and elegant with a textured cotton drum shade.
Blue or red and white stripes give the room a maritime vibe, especially with a crisp white linen shade.
Combine a rustic white base with a pale blue shade for a coastal cottage theme.
A bright coral pink base with a sky blue shade adds an exotic Caribbean touch.

Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Textures

An essential component of beach-style interiors is natural texture, evoking rough sand, weathered driftwood, fragrant seagrass, and lapping waves.

The lamp on your nightstand is a perfect vehicle for adding textural interest to the room.

Best Textures For Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Glass

Glass is delicate and transparent, suitable for adults’ bedrooms. Choose lamp bases reminiscent of blue-green sea glass or light swirling patterns of Venetian-style glass.

One charming option is to use fillable glass bottles or antique jars as lamp bases: they can become repositories for treasures found on seaside walks, like shells, sand, or sand dollars.

Mirrored or luminescent glass adds a shimmer, like iridescent seashells or the light on water.

Glass shades are beautiful, especially if you have a Tiffany-style shade with stylized ocean elements.

Another idea is to use pendant lights suspended over the nightstands. Blue glass provides light, but the gentle blue evokes images of lapping waves and ocean breezes.

Best Textures For Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Driftwood

The faded grey, white and tan colors and weathered textures of driftwood are quintessential to beach-style interiors.

Choose a lamp with a base made from woven driftwood twigs, a rough slab of wood, or a white-washed carving.

If you prefer your wood more polished, an elegant base of blond maple or ash suits the coastal look.

The lampshade can also have a gently weathered pattern if driftwood is too casual for your interior.

Best Textures For Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Rope

Another characteristic of beach-style is the use of rope, netting, and woven textures. While you don’t want to look like a restaurant selling seafood, a couple of these elements will add seaside charm.

Consider a lamp with a rope-wrapped base or a glass bottle with a net covering. A net-like shade is also a unique possibility.

Rope also lends itself to pendant lights in the form of a frame for a hanging lamp.

Best Textures For Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Bamboo And Seagrass

Wicker and rattan furniture and jute or seagrass mats are popular in beach houses for robustness and relaxed appeal.

Echo these textures in your bedside lamps with a bamboo woven base or lampshade or a fragrant seagrass-covered base.

Beach-style Bedside Lamps: Novelty

Lamps are a fun way to introduce seaside accents, images, or realia into your décor. Take care not to overdo the novelty items as you risk a kitsch interior. However, some well-chosen features can add whimsy to your home, like bedside lamps.

Most bedrooms have two bedside lamps, one for each side of the bed. Choosing similar yet slightly different novelty lamps adds an amusing touch.

Best Bedside Novelty Lamps: Ocean Elements

An ideal way to develop a coastal theme in your bedroom is to choose a lamp base made of or shaped like a piece of coral, seashell, starfish, sand dollar, scallop, or coconut. Keep the colors muted for elegance, or choose a vivid pink coral base as a pop of color.

A retro trend is to have a lamp base decorated with seashells or slivers of mother-of-pearl, but fillable glass bottles are also a lovely way to introduce ocean shells.

If a seashell-shaped lamp is too twee for your taste, choose lamp bases with the textures and colors of seashells: pearlescent whites and swirling creams nod to the beauty of shells.

Add delicate lampshades and pendant lamps made with strings of oyster shells or sculpted like a jellyfish. Or have fun with shades patterned with whales, starfish, seahorses, or abstract waves.

A starfish or mermaid-shaped nightlight is fun for a kid’s room, and bright colors always delight children.

Best Bedside Novelty Lamps: Nautical Elements

Beach homes lend themselves to a nautical theme, which you can use to style your bedside lamps.

You can find a variety of lamps and bases made from items of salvaged ship hardware, such as a hurricane lamp or spotlight. Beautiful brass, aluminum, and chrome replicas are also available.

Other popular nautical designs are an anchor, a miniature rudder, or a sailing ship.

Nautical lamps add charm and excitement to children’s bedrooms: choose a light shaped like a lighthouse, a sailing ship, or a metal bucket filled with “sand.” You can, of course, develop a pirate or mermaid theme.

Conclusion

Bedside lamps are ideal for highlighting a beach or coastal interior style in your bedroom. Bearing in mind that a light is functional, as well as aesthetic, use it as a color accent, to add texture, or to add a note of whimsy through a seaside or novelty shape.

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Chrissie Smuts

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