Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen on children's bedroom design

Interior designer extraordinaire Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen offers his top tips on decorating bedrooms for children of all ages

A newborn baby (bearing in mind that at time of decorating the baby is unborn and the sex unknown)

Most important of all, bear in mind, you are going to be in your child’s room for a lot of your life over the next 18 months, so ensure that the room doesn’t take on a nightmarish, garish pattern of grinning nodding clowns.Keep the whole thing quite restful, specifically for you when you are doing the nighttime feed.

A toddler aged two - four years (boy and girl)
Avoid anything too contrived and interactive. Most designers will give you all sorts of cunning tips to make felt bags to hang over the side of a toddler chair, or painting a band of blackboard paint at toddler height so they can draw on it themselves. Half the time you give a toddler a toy, all they want to do is play with the box so keep yourself flexible.
Decorate the space as practically as possible with easily activated storage. You may find that you have a child genius on your hands and you need to get them a boudoir grand piano before the time they are four, so don’t feel that you need to spend lots of time making a mural out of jangling cow bells and magnetic strips as an interactive distraction for the toddler – they will probably end up completely ignoring it anyway and end up playing with the radiator valve instead.
Boys are much more exploratory with things so there is a real issue about making sure that they can’t climb on shelves or get through easily operable windows. 

A junior aged five - seven years (boy and  girl)
By five to seven years, a little one’s personalities are really taking flight so I think it is very important to actually involve them in decisions on colours and patterns – but don’t patronise them. Both girls and boys should not just be marched off to the local nursery shop and shown the latest mass-produced licensed paper based on a toy or a doll.Take them into a proper decorating shop and show them real wallpaper, show them real fabric, get them feeling very involved in that it is a design scheme being tailored for them – not something that can be done for any five to seven year-old.I don’t think it should be different between boys and girls.
There is a real temptation to assume that somehow girls are a lot more aware of their environment than boys, but actually I think that the left hand side of a boys brain should be fully stimulated and encouraged no matter how young they are: they should be taken and shown different ways of doing things. You shouldn’t just assume that they are going to want the ceiling painted the same colour as superman’s underpants. 

Storage in children's bedroomsStorage is one of those things that can go horribly wrong in a children’s bedroom because the children feel that if there is storage available then everything just gets picked up and plonked straight in it and then kicked under the bed because it gets it out of the way.Having storage for not regularly used items is a good thing, but actually having open shelves will encourage them to think about how they put things away.I have found, partly with my youngest Hermione, that if a cupboard has got a door on it or a shelf has got a drawer in it everything just gets thrown in without any kind of thought. Whereas having things arranged on a mantelpiece or windowsill, means they will think about it a lot more and spend more time arranging things. 

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