Nightstands: The Small Table That Completes a Bedroom

A nightstand is a small piece of furniture with a disproportionate impact. It sits within arm's reach of where you sleep, holds the things you need before and after rest, and defines the last thing you see when you close your eyes at night. Choose it well and the bedroom feels complete. Get it wrong — wrong height, wrong scale, wrong finish — and the bed looks abandoned.

Eichholtz makes dozens of nightstand designs, ranging from marble-topped pedestals to upholstered velvet drawers to geometric brass structures. Choosing among them is partly a function of your bed frame and bedroom scale, and partly a function of how you actually use the bedside — lamp, phone, water glass, book. This guide covers both.

The nightstand doesn't just hold things. It anchors the bed, balances the room, and sets the material tone for everything around it.

Proportion First

Height is the most important dimension. The surface of a nightstand should sit at roughly the same level as the top of your mattress — or within two to three inches of it. Too low and you're reaching down; too high and you're searching past a wall. Most mattresses with a standard bed frame and box spring sit around 24 to 26 inches off the floor. Most Eichholtz nightstands are sized to match: the Modesto, for instance, lands at 26 inches.

Width matters too, though the room often decides this for you. A nightstand narrower than the bed's headboard rail looks wispy; one that projects well past it can crowd the room. A surface of 20 to 24 inches tends to read well beside a king or queen bed. For a smaller room, something closer to 18 inches keeps the sightlines open without feeling underfurnished.

Depth — front to back — is often overlooked until you're in the room. Eight to twelve inches is the functional range for most bedside use. Shallower and the lamp has nowhere to go; deeper and the table intrudes into the walking path alongside the bed.

Material and the Bedroom Palette

The nightstand is one of the few pieces in a bedroom that sits at close range — you touch it, you see it from inches away in lamplight, you notice the grain or the sheen of the hardware in ways you don't with a piece across the room. Material decisions matter more here than anywhere else.

• Wood veneer. Warm, grounding, and works with nearly every palette. Oak and walnut are the standards; Eichholtz uses both, sometimes mixing them with brass inlay or lacquer on the drawer front for contrast. A dark stained veneer with gold-toned hardware reads as classic hotel suite — polished and understated.
• Upholstered panels. Velvet or bouclé on a nightstand drawer front is a softer choice that sits well in a bedroom built around upholstered headboards or soft wall treatments. The Velutto is the clearest example in the collection — its drawer face and body are fully upholstered, and it pairs naturally with padded or tufted bed frames.
• Lacquered or painted finish. Higher gloss, more graphic, and tends to anchor a room that's already using clean lines and minimal ornament. Works best when the rest of the room doesn't compete — a simple linen headboard, neutral walls, no busy pattern on the rug.
• Metal or geometric inlay. Brass, nickel, or mirrored glass surfaces reflect light and open up a smaller bedroom. The ArtDeco nightstand uses geometric brass inlay in a way that references Twenties craftsmanship without being a costume — bold without being busy, and strong enough to hold its own beside an upholstered headboard.

Storage: How Much Do You Actually Need?

One drawer handles most of what people keep at the bedside: a charger, lip balm, a paperback, the occasional remote. If you find yourself needing more than one drawer, it's worth asking whether the issue is the nightstand or the bedroom's overall storage. Two-drawer options exist in the Eichholtz range, but for most rooms a single deep drawer with a clear, unencumbered top surface is preferable to a stacked unit that starts to feel like office furniture.

Open shelving below the drawer — a lower tier for books, a charging pad, a small plant — is another approach, and it keeps the piece visually lighter than a solid case. A slim drawer at the top with an open lower shelf and tapered legs that lift the whole thing off the floor will not read as a block of mass beside the bed. That's a structural decision worth considering in a room where visual weight matters.

Pairing with the Bed Frame

The nightstand doesn't have to match the bed frame, but it should be in conversation with it. A few patterns that tend to work:

• Same material family, different application. Walnut bed frame, walnut-accent nightstand with a lacquered drawer front. Related but not identical — the room feels curated rather than matchy.
• Contrast that echoes an accent already in the room. If the room uses brass hardware — on a chandelier, a chair leg, a mirror frame — a nightstand with brass pulls or inlay picks up that thread and ties the room together without adding a new material into the mix.
• Tone match, not finish match. A warm cream upholstered headboard and a warm cream bouclé nightstand read as family even if the textures are entirely different. The bedroom feels cohesive without being monotone.

What tends not to work is mixing very different visual weights. A heavily carved wooden bed with a glass-and-brass pedestal nightstand that has no visual mass beside it — the bed dominates and the nightstand disappears. The nightstand needs enough presence to read as an equal, even if it's a fraction of the size.

Nightstand ArtDeco

Nightstand Velutto

Nightstand Colston

The Styling Layer

What you place on a nightstand is part of the design. The basics — lamp, phone, water glass — are functional. The rest is optional but worth thinking through.

A table lamp at the right height makes the single biggest difference. The shade should sit at eye level when you're reading in bed — roughly 15 to 18 inches of lamp above the nightstand surface. The lamp grounds the nightstand and anchors the bed visually from across the room. A small sculpture, a bud vase, a single book face-up — these add warmth without adding clutter. A nightstand that's covered in cords, tubes, and stacked objects starts to look like a utility shelf, and no amount of good furniture design survives that.

If your room uses a sconce above or beside the bed instead of a table lamp, the nightstand's top is free — which makes the styling simpler and keeps the surface more useful. That's a trade worth considering if you're outfitting a room from scratch: wall-mounted lighting gives back the nightstand surface entirely, and it tends to read as a more finished solution.

Seeing the Range in Person

Photographs of nightstands don't always translate clearly into rooms. The scale is difficult to gauge without a bed frame in the same image, and the finish reads differently under daylight versus lamp light — a matte veneer that looks flat in a catalog image comes alive in a lit bedroom. We carry a full range of Eichholtz nightstands in the showroom at Tivoli Village, positioned beside bed frames and under realistic lighting, because the decisions you'll make for a bedroom are easier to make in context.

If you're a designer specifying for a client's primary suite, the showroom functions as a presentation and sample space. In-stock pieces typically ship in two to four weeks from the Eichholtz warehouse network — considerably faster than the twelve to twenty-four weeks that's standard for made-to-order alternatives in this market.