In the past few years, there has been a rise in dreamy nurseries and baby rooms, with atmospheric lighting, neutral color palettes, and cozy design elements. If you’re having a baby soon and thinking of ways to design your nursery using these trends, here’s a step-by-step guide to achieving that look.
Establish a cohesive floor plan
This is the most important part of designing a nursery that’s both aesthetic and fully-functional, which is why it must be the first step. The last thing you want is an ergonomically-incorrect baby room—meaning you don’t want to bump into dressers or tables or having to deal with anything that might disrupt your baby’s sleep. Here are some pointers to keep in mind when deciding on the floor plan or layout:
- If your home is near a noise-polluted area, like a highway or a train, consider having the room soundproofed.
- Ensure that all the furniture pieces, like dressers and small tables, are anchored to the wall.
- Keep the crib at the center of the room so that it’s the star and that everything else is pointing to it. Add a rug underneath the crib to enforce it as the centerpiece.
- Position the dresser and the changing table adjacent to each other so that you have everything you need for diapering within reach.
- Use sheer, airy, and light curtains to let natural light in.
- If the nursery is being shared with an older sibling, or if you’re having twins, make sure the cribs or the crib and bed are placed at a safe distance but adjacent to each other.
- Be strategic with your layout. Ensure that there’s a table beside your rocking chair where you can place your loose belongings while putting the baby to sleep.
Create a mood board
Now that you have established a floor plan or a layout, now is the time to think about designs. When thinking of a concept or a theme, it’s good to follow basic interior design rules: unction before form, make sure everything is cohesive, think long-term, keep it comfortable, make sure there’s enough space, and mind the scale of your furniture and design elements.
Select the right colors
When it comes to choosing colors, you can follow the 60-30-10 rule, which is this:
- 60 percent of the room’s main color, which means the walls, main furniture pieces, rugs, bed, and others
- 30 percent should be the complementary color, which means any color you use on statement chairs, accent walls, linen, and drapes, and
- 10 percent accent color, which should go to your throw pillows, decorative lamps, wall art, baskets, and your baby’s personal items like toys, bottles, teething toys, and others.
If you’re really after the dreamy look for a nursery, opt for neutral colors like creams, muted gray, white, and other pastel colors. Gone are the days of the traditional pink or blue, and we’re in the days of neutral and earthy color palettes. You can also look into color psychology as you finalize the colors you want for your baby’s room.
Colors influence behavior, and you and your partner need to decide how certain colors make you feel. While you can certainly look into the research behind which colors do what for our moods, you and your partner get to decide how certain shades and hues impact your thoughts and emotions. So sit together and think of a color palette that makes you feel calm and well-rested when you’re in the room.
Choose a theme for cohesion
As time goes on, we continue to move away from choosing colors as a theme to choosing a concept. It’s no longer blue for boys and pink for girls—now it will depend on the story or theme you choose until your little bundle of joy is old enough to figure out an aesthetic of their own. Some of the more popular baby room themes of recent years are:
- Giraffes
- Mountains
- Nautical
- Black and white
- Horses
- Ballet
- Elephants
- Color gallery
- Scandinavian
- Summer days
- Baby animals
- Swans
- Eclectic
- Cartoons
Ensure safety
There are plenty of baby safety guidelines you need to follow when designing their rooms, many of them reminders that we often forget. For example, you need to ensure that your baby cannot reach the drapes, cords, or anything long that they can find themselves tangled in. Baby-proofing should also come as the natural last step when decorating your baby room.
This is an exciting time, albeit daunting, and designing the nursery in the best way possible might make this time much less stressful. Do the research and go wild with the decor! Just make sure everything is safe and functional for you and your munchkin.
