The story below is a preview from our July/August 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
These ideas on function plus style share how to use elements that will grow with your kids without being too cutesy.
There is a phase during pregnancy called “nesting,” which the American Pregnancy Association defines as “the overwhelming desire to get your home ready for your new baby.” Cleaning, organizing, painting a room and filling it with all the ephemera that newborns seem to require can be inspiring to new parents. Some parents like to create a theme for their new baby, organizing the books and tiny clothes into a rainbow- or nautical-inspired space. Some parents create a space that feels cohesive to their own style and the rest of their home, with sophisticated storage and fabrics for a notably chic, elevated nursery. The room, after all, is mostly for the parents’ needs and eyes in those first few years. The baby hasn’t yet learned about unicorns or dinosaurs, let alone a certain cartoon canine patrol squad. They don’t have preferences and opinions about how to store their toys and books, or what should be on their walls. They are the ideal client for design-conscious parents, who can create a room that they, first and foremost, enjoy spending time in.
But anyone with kids knows that it doesn’t take long for their individual personalities and style preferences to emerge. The more exposure they have to the world, they learn about kid-targeted toys, brands and media that are not exactly aesthetically cohesive. Beloved characters with giant logos and cheap materials in garish colorways can easily stage a coup on the beloved nursery, turning a beautiful design into a once-pristine-landscape now littered with, well, trash.
As we are gearing up for kindergarten in our family, we have been talking about our first “big kid room” upgrade, and our client is not as laid-back as she was for her nursery design. When discussing colorways, our client tends to lean toward pink and purple, and she is not interested in the more muted, softer toned versions of these hues: fuchsia, hot pink and electric purple are the paint chips she keeps going back to, insisting that she will love these colors “forever.” Bedding and window treatments don’t tend to interest her unless she remembers the fact that she once saw a certain ice queen-themed set at Target once. She is a very big fan of her dollhouses and art supplies, so we also need to find ways to store and display her creations so that they are both functional and not impossible to quickly clean up at the end of each day. Our client insists that leaving everything on the floor will solve this dilemma.
Our plans include replacing the toddler bed with a twin and making space for a new desk and bookshelf. We currently have a mural, a large chalkboard, a dressing rack and mirror set, two bookshelves and a toy storage cube. We have a limited budget and a few space constraints (the radiator prevents some configurations, and the walk-in closet does not have a light source). And of course, we are hoping to achieve the nearly impossible of both satisfying our client and designing a room that we also love and, most importantly, won’t have to completely overhaul when our client’s tastes inevitably change in just a few years. (However loyal she seems to the ice queen now in no way convinces me that she won’t go the way of the British pig family our child was equally obsessed with two years ago.) It is important to us that she has a say in the changes we make to her room. We want her to feel ownership and pride in her space –– I think in theory, this means she just might care for it a bit more, right?
So how do parents marry their design-conscious goals with a child’s interests, especially when those preferences are not remotely timeless, versatile or easy to design around? While I can’t share a one-size-fits-all rule book, I can tell you what general principles we’re keeping in mind as we tackle this particular challenge.
Visual Communication
If there’s anything I’ve learned from years of creative work, it is that nothing is more essential to a collaborative visual project than an image. Words are fluid and nuanced in a way that can lead to gaps in expectations between the designer and the client. An image pins down the details, making it much easier to visualize ideas and specify likes and dislikes that language might miss.
For example, I am particularly less than excited by my client’s insistence on every aspect of her new room coming in saturated neon pinks and purples. This doesn’t even come down to my own visual preferences alone, but other essential considerations, like understanding how that quality of color will interact with one another, how it will change the feeling of the space and the short-term devotion the client is likely to have for these hues. It’s not exactly sustainable or feasible to do a full color-related overhaul of her bedroom every few years. But communicating this to a four-year-old requires pictures.
With a general knowledge of her color interests, I started looking for images of kids’ rooms that used those colors as well as a mix of others to start a low-stakes mood board. Through this process, we’ve discovered that there are actually a lot of other colors that we both like –– like sea green and soft teal –– which offer a complementary base for the pinks and purples she wants. She’s also found a number of shades of pinks and purples that she likes in different contexts, like in paint trim instead of all the walls, or concentrated in the closet for a dramatic pop when the door opens. My client simply didn’t have a frame of reference for these ideas without the photos. Now, searching on Pinterest and adding to our mood board is a fun, collaborative experience that is helping us to expand our options so that when we finally narrow down our choices, they will be well-informed and hopefully something we can love for years to come.
Firm Boundaries, Held Loosely
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The story above is a preview from our July/August 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!