My friend asked me recently to help her out with her young sons’ new bedroom. The newly redecorated guest room – pristine plastered white walls, pale carpet, original Victorian fireplace – will now become the boys’ room and therefore needs an injection of colour and life.
My friend wasn’t sure where to start and she certainly doesn’t want to change or ruin any of the existing decor. She has a very clear sense of style and loves mid-century and Scandinavian decor and really doesn’t want the room to become a cartoon-themed style-less space. However, she obviously wants the boys to be happy.
So, the first thing I suggested was to sit down with the boys and ask them what they loved most in the world. I always start the redecorating process by thinking about a particular piece of furniture, artwork or colour that I feel really passionate about and I often base a scheme around just one particular item. For example, when I began my office makeover I based the colour palette for the room around my favourite Double Merrick print.
The boys’ response boiled down to two things, after a few leading questions. Firstly, they both “love all the animals in the zoo” and when we probed them about colours (they’re obsessed with Lego so we made them identify those colours), they decided they loved “all the colours of the rainbow”. So cute! I pulled together a mood board based on those two themes and tried to include accessories so that the existing decor won’t need to be changed at all. I also didn’t want to include anything that is too gender-specific – personally, I’m not a fan of ‘blue’ boys’ rooms and ‘pink’ girls’ rooms.
I found some gorgeous accessories in Argos that combine both the boys’ passions, such as the cushions. Other additions like colourful lighting, blankets, prints and toys (I love the super cute animal nesting dolls) can be added to the room relatively cheaply and still fit with the style of the rest of the house as they are all so well designed.
When looking in furniture stores, my friend became adamant that she didn’t want any ‘children’s furniture’ because she wants more longevity and flexibility than that. Therefore, I picked out a few pieces with the help of Argos’s home buying guide that I think are stylish and fit well with her passion for mid-century and Scandinavian furniture (I totally want that wardrobe and set of drawers myself!), yet won’t look out of place in a children’s bedroom. I also added a couple of untreated wooden pieces – the bedside drawers and bench – that could be a really fun project for the kids to decorate with their animal and rainbow colour theme and give them some ownership over the room. The pieces can easily revert to plain, tasteful pieces of storage in the future when the boys are older.
What are you passionate about that you would use as a starting point for redecorating a room? It’s so much easier if you hone in on one particular item or something you really love rather than picking completely random colours and accessories.
Katy x
Disclosure: This post was written in collaboration with Argos but all the views and opinions are my own.
