How to decorate your childrens’ rooms

Really wasn’t sure where to put the apostrophe in that title.

Decorating children’s rooms, what a kerfuffle. When we were little, it wasn’t the same. No Pinterest in the 1980s and no dedicated children’s interiors lines so you were lucky if you were allowed to blu-tack a picture of Take That to your wall and call it done. Today though, such a different ball game. Pinterest makes me feel like all children’s rooms are a sea of tasteful neutrals with colour pops of chevron and posters of inspirational quotes.

My experience of real life children’s rooms doesn’t quite bear this out though – mostly the rooms that our children’s friends have are, like ours, somewhat more of a simple effort – and sadly, often spoiled by the fact that an actual child lives and sleeps and plays in that room and therefore no matter how many beautiful baskets you buy for the toys to be stored, you will still have to clear a path to walk from the door to the bed through the duplo/lego/pretend shop that your children have lovingly created.

I really didn’t want to decorate our children’s rooms in a way that only an adult would appreciate, with muted greys and monochrome prints, but I also wasn’t keen on the other end of the scale with lurid print and too much colour, given what we already know about how children have terrible taste. I also am not one to feel like a child’s room should be overly ‘themed’.

So, how to decorate your children’s room?

We kept the walls white throughout our house, kids rooms included. Coloured walls were a bridge too far for me, although there are some lovely ideas out there for feature walls and print wallpaper… but we stuck to the white.

Here are some of the images I found that provided some inspiration…

Images all from Houzz

Things I liked: natural wood, natural fibres for rugs, colourful wall art, children’s wall art, fun lighting, exposed floor boards.

Other things I was keen to incorporate – Shelving that was low enough for them to use independently, and a shelf-style desk the width of a wall, all along these lines: