In Disney’s Encanto, Bruno Madrigal's bedroom was shown to be a desolate sand-filled space - but a detail revealed when his niece Mirabel visited the room suggested an even greater depth of sadness to his story. As with the rest of the Madrigal family, other than Mirabel, Bruno had been given a magical gift to go with his magical bedroom. However, his gift of foresight and the ability to prophesize the future came at great cost. The villagers and his family turned against him when his sometimes confusing visions suggested negative futures and the loss of the Madrigals' magical powers.
As a result, Bruno exiled himself without leaving the confines of the Casita. Instead, he remained devastatingly close to his family because of his great love for them. Aside from Delores, whose own powers had a dark edge and allowed her to hear him moving behind the walls of the house, the whole family believed he had left the Casita and the village. It was Mirabel who found him in a secret passageway in the Casita’s walls and discovered a shy man, nothing like the person described in “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”.
Before this, she had already visited Bruno’s long-abandoned bedroom, and - like the bedrooms of the other members of the Madrigal family - the room complimented Bruno’s gift. As he later explained, he needed a lot of space to be able to conjure up visions of the future for people and, as a result, his room was vast, cavernous, and largely empty. The other key element of the room was the towering stairway that led up to the platform where he performed his magic. This not only led to questions about how Mirabel escaped Bruno's room, but it also provided a powerful metaphor for the distance that Bruno had created between himself, his gift, and the people he loved. Not only were there a huge number of steps, but they had become increasingly treacherous by the time Mirabel climbed them. In this way, they reflected Bruno’s growing need to make it more difficult for others to come to him in search of his prophecies due to the pain and disappointment they seemed to cause.
In a recent Q&A session on Twitter, Encanto director Jared Bush confirmed that the room had not always had so many stairs, claiming that "We always thought Bruno’s room developed more stairs as he became more distant from the family". Taking this a stage further, it was possible that they represented more than just the figurative distance between Bruno and those he loved and watched over. Each of the steps may have even represented a sad moment caused by a prophecy he had given to someone. Indeed, if that was the case then the sheer number of steps would make exiling himself from his family and, more importantly, from his gift a completely justified decision.
However, there was hope for change to the physical and metaphorical layout of Bruno's room. This comes from the conclusion of Encanto with the rebuilding of the Casita, Bruno reconciling with his family, and the Madrigal family regaining their magic. With these changes and his return to the center of the family, alongside Mirabel and her secret gift of sight, the likelihood of Bruno’s visions being positive became much more likely. Given that the visions were the root cause of his estrangement, this should bring an end to his need for maintaining distance from his beloved family and allow his gift to stop being a curse and finally live up to its name.