Dressing your dresser: 7 styles that are on trend right now

What is on top of your dresser? Tell the truth: we've all piled random "stuff" on our dressers from time to time. Maybe yours is piled high right now.

​But as a functional piece of furniture, dressers serve a dual purpose: they provide storage (preferably IN the drawers, and not ON the dresser), and they help communicate your personal style via the items you choose to place on top, as much as the style of the piece itself.

That's a tall order to fill for one piece of furniture, so let's take a little of the pressure off, and walk through some ideas for how to style your dresser's top to reflect you.

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First a quick furniture vocabulary lesson: a dresser is typically long and low - it is wider than it is tall, and may have a mirror on top of it. It might have 3 or 4 drawers, 6 drawers (the most common) or 8, 9, or even 12 drawers. By comparison, a chest is tall, or at least taller than it is wide. It might be a chest-on-chest with 6 or more drawers, often separated by a stabilizing and decorative piece of wood, creating the illusion of two stacked pieces of furniture.

If you're shopping for a dresser (or chest) you might find yourself in pursuit of a chester drawers (translation: chest of drawers), cheetah drawers (also translated chest of drawers), or draws (yes, that means drawers.) It can make the hunt a little more interesting to know those common typos and mispronunciations.

Okay, enough with the elocution lecture, let's get into the practical matter of what do you do with the dresser in your  bedroom.  If it's a catch-all for clutter, now's a good time to practice a little Konmarie  style cleaning and make those extraneous items find their rightful homes, or otherwise get them gone. (We believe your bedroom should be a sanctuary, to the extent that's possible. So you have our blessing to clear off those surfaces and start with a blank slate.)

If you've been following our bedroom redo story, you know that we were struggling with having just one 4-drawer   chest, upon which rested a too-large TV....and little room for much else. Now we've added a six-drawer dresser to the bedroom, and the TV has been wall-mounted. (Yes, we too wrestle with "to have a TV or no TV" in the bedroom question, and we decided to keep it. We usually turn it on in the mornings to catch news and weather, and we occasionally curl up to finish watching a movie or game before we drift off to sleep. YMMV.)

So let's talk style....what does your dresser top say about your style? We've gathered up 7 distinct dresser/TV combos to give you some ideas of how to stage and style this surface to suit yourself.

You'll notice a few commonalities among these examples:

• For one, they aren't overdone. Most of them ascribe to the less-is-more ideal. (Which makes dusting and cleaning easier!)
• With the exception of the formal traditional dresser, they are asymmetrical: the items are balanced in terms of visual "weight" but they aren't identical items placed symmetrically around the television. This tends to provide a slightly more relaxed and comfortable feel to the room.
• There are only a few examples with lamps on these dressers - most likely because a lamp will interfere with the clarity of the television screen. If you must have a lamp on your dresser to provide bedroom lighting, experiment with its position and the bulb wattage to find a "happy medium" that works for your space.

​So what did we do with our dresser? We're glad you asked....and we'll answer it next week with pictures and a wrap-up of our bedroom redo.