With many parents opting for solid hardwood kids’ beds, and properly made furniture that will last both in terms of style and in materials, we thought we’d whip up a handy little guide to styling a kids’ traditional bedroom.
In our opinion, if space allows, nothing looks better than a room of beautifully coordinated and furnished children’s bedroom furniture.
What’s more, is that decent quality chests of drawers, wardrobes and bedside tables are all fantastic pieces for multiple use – for example, in guest rooms, reception rooms and hallways and landings, too.
So without further ado, here are our top tips on styling kids’ traditional bedrooms.
Plan your layout
A quick and accurate way of planning their floor space is to grab a pad of graph paper, a pencil and a tape measure, and get drawing! It’s a good idea to measure the space first, and then check it. – Measure twice, draw once and all that. If your graph paper is 1:100 (ie 1cm = 1m = 1 square on the paper), then it’s easy to plot your measurements on there. Draw the outline of the room to scale using a ruler, add the windows and radiators, doors (including opening allowances) and any other architectural elements that will be staying. Some people like to use a pen when drawing, our top tip is to always use a pencil; that way errors can be erased, and you can always define the lines in pen afterwards.
Next comes the fun part:
Research your beds and furniture
If you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, why not create a Pinterest board for your child’s new room, and start pinning inspiration? Create a wide search for images using keywords like ‘Children’s single beds’ or ‘kids beds’ to start with, and as you narrow down what you’re looking for, become more specific with your search terms, eg ‘white kids beds with storage trundle’.
Once you’ve found a bedroom furniture range that you (and they!) love, take another sheet of paper and in the same scale as the outline plan, draw on simple rectangular shapes to represent the beds and furniture. Most products online have dimensions that you can use, so this method involves a little bit of research in terms of visiting the brands or retailers websites and checking out their product descriptions and information. Of course, because this plan will be a birds eye view which only captures the foot print of a piece of furniture or bed, it’s important to also check room heights and bed and furniture heights to ensure that it will all fit that way around, too!
Arrange, and rearrange to your heart’s content
Once you’ve got scaled 2D icons of your desired furniture, cut them out. Now the fun begins! Arrange them on top of your outlined floor plan in the layout that you think is best for their room. Take a photo from above, so that you have it captured, and then rearrange the icons into a different layout. Do this as many times as you need to in order to work out the optimum layout for your child’s room. Once you think you’ve cracked it, check out your photos and see which works the best. As long as you’ve captured snaps of all of your bedroom layouts, you’ll be informed enough when it’s time to come to putting their new furniture into the room. Of course, there are sometimes exceptions, and the best time to judge is when it’s in situ, but 85% of the time, what works best on paper does so in reality too.
Now for the furniture itself…
Check out the safety standards
Whichever brand or retailer you buy from, we’d always advise asking about safety standards. – Ask whether the product you like complies with the current rules and regulations, and even ask how their products are tested. – Safety is something we take very seriously at Little Folks Furniture, and it is a large part of our design justifications and choices. There are many ways to make a bed, but not many ways to make strong and safe ones. Read more about our safety standards here.
Find out what the materials are
At Little Folks, we use a holistic design process. This means that we consider the safety, assembly and manufacture of our children’s beds and furniture products at the very initial design stages, just as much as how they look. Not everything that looks the same actually is underneath, especially when it comes to painted wooden furniture, so if longevity, endurance and durability are important to you, check what the furniture is made from.
Side note: We have a whole other blog post on why we favour using hardwoods, and why our bed frames are all crafted using solid hardwoods, but we won’t go into those details here. If you fancy further reading on the subject, check it out here.
Research the product imagery
Sounds like a pretty obvious thing to do, but make sure that once you’ve found a range you think will fit and suit their bedroom, check through all the online imagery that you can find. - There are sure to be various angles that the product has been photographed in, as well as seeing it styled in a variety of ways. Seek out the brand on Instagram and run a hashtag search with the brand name. – You may find a huge amount of imagery with the brand tagged, and it’s great to see how other customers have styled the same products.
Select a classic colour that will last the trends
In our opinion, selecting a neutral colour for beds and furniture is always best, unless you want to be doing updates every year of course!
Our Fargo classic bedroom furniture range comes in our signature range of colours, inspired by period homes. The range includes; Ivory White, a gorgeous creamy off white hue that looks particularly beautiful when styled with delicate pinks or strong navy. We also have our ever popular Farleigh Grey, which is such a versatile mid grey and can be styled with pretty much any colour under the sun, and our Painswick Blue; a deep, indigo blue which looks fabulous with mustard, grey or red.
Think about the product longevity
If you’re looking at single bed, it could be wise to invest in a bed with storage, or trundle underneath. This way you make use of all the otherwise wasted space under the bed, and have versatility for when friends come to stay.
If you know you’d like to potentially use the furniture in another room after, think ahead. – Will a high chest of drawers suit the space better, or would something lower and closer to the ground allow a greater feeling of space? As a general rule of thumb, tall pieces of furniture such as kids’ armoires, tallboys and combination wardrobes look especially spectacular in high ceiling period homes, or rooms that have lots of space, whereas smaller chests of drawers can be particularly effective storage solutions for attic rooms.
And there you have it; our top tips on styling a classic kids’ bedroom.
For more inspiration on luxury traditional children’s beds and furniture, take a look at our lovely Fargo bedroom range. With something for everyone, it’s a classic and gorgeous design that will stand the test of time in both style and substance.
Happy styling! x
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