A Monochrome Kid’s Room

When you decorate a new house there are a multitude of features to consider: paint colours, furniture, floor coverings, artwork, soft furnishings, window dressings. Room-by-room it’s a fun process, if not completely and utterly overwhelming.

I’ve been working on the kids’ bedroom recently – the final room in the house to get the magic wand of my interior design magic (hah!) waved over it – and it’s been the most difficult one of all to get right. Once storage was tackled (never again, touch wood: NIGHTMARE) I started thinking about colour schemes and textiles.

My children share a room and will do for at least the next couple of years. I like it that way, it means they’re great friends (most of the time), and they love being together. But despite my bringing them up in as much of a fair and gender-neutral fashion as possible, I firmly have one girly girl into pink, glitter and fairies and one bruiser boy loving his green dinosaurs, airplanes and ninjas. ARGH. Try coming up with a colour scheme around those two fickle personalities.

So their colour schemes had to be as neutral as possible, with a little bit of adaptation for each child’s area of the bedroom. Which is why I turned to one of the current big Scandi trends: MONOCHROME.

Monochrome Kids Room

Firstly, the beds. I bought these as bunks in our old house, purposefully purchasing a set that could be split apart once we moved: they’re white gloss, simple, classy… jobs a good’un. They fit with the shelves that my dad installed above their beds, which I call their ‘special shelves’,  an area they can use to store all the things that are special to them that won’t fit in any other areas of the house.

Their bedside unit is a shared one and is waiting to be spray-painted white as soon as the weather turns slightly balmier. It’s not shown above but they also have a small white KALLAX for books and a white chest of drawers inherited from my parents. Basically, everything that can be white is white.

Sheets: these were so much fun to purchase. I went with plain white cotton duvet covers and pillow cases from John Lewis for both (and bought a spare), meaning there’d be no struggle over different colourways or patterns. I learned my lesson with this in their last bedroom; they had gorgeous flannel sheets which took days to dry and heaven forbid if we had a middle-of-the-night incident that required a slightly different sheet to be used on the bed. Drama no more!

I added interest with a chevron mattress sheet that peeks out from under the duvet (though am in love with the dots undersheet from MissPrint) and personality with cushions they chose themselves – Elfie even made one of her own at sewing club! Cohesion was brought back with the addition of two EIVOR blankets from IKEA.

Window treatments has been the big one as there’s a long bank of 6 windows in the room that needs covering, ideally as darkly as possible (anyone else’s kids a fan of the 5am start? Just mine?!). I’ve long been a fan of blinds – I don’t have any curtains in this house at all – and there are venetian versions there at the moment. I find that children have such a mega amount of ‘tat’ to display, that having to constantly open and close curtains disrupts it. I much prefer the minimal ease of blinds but the current ones are too cold for the room.

To warm it up I’ve gone for these black blackout Roman blinds (seriously, with my two I can’t get black enough) from Blinds UK, and I expect blissful 8am wakeup calls to begin as soon as they arrive.

I’m waiting for the children to return from their dad’s so they can ‘choose their own’ rug: this will mean me taking them to IKEA and strongly pointing them in the direction of the LAPPLJUNG RUTA, which I think will really warm up the cork flooring (and will look awesome!).

Would you go monochrome with your kids?

Thank you to Blinds UK for working with MTT!