The 7 Essential Babies Room Ideas

When you’re expecting, the number of things that you need to do to prepare can seem overwhelming. We started with Noah’s bedroom, we spent many an hour googling babies room ideas to no avail. In the end, we simply did a list of babies room ideas and stuck with it, the results have been great.

A parents view on how to build the best babies room

I write this review 5 years into parenthood and as a father of two, a 4 and 1-year-old gorgeous boys. If you’re looking at nursery ideas, then your obviously expecting and are looking for some inspirational ideas to make your little ones new bedroom the best it can be and a perfect place to start their new life.

Over the course of 5 years, I have become an expert in building babies rooms. There are essentially a list of key ingredients to getting it right which I have shared below;

The Key Ingredients

1. Keep it cosy
2. Make it fun
3. A place to read
4. It’s all about practicality
5. invest in the best blinds
6. ensure there is room to grow
7. Get the colours right

Keep it Cosy

I mention firstly keeping it cosy, as this has always been important to me. From my earliest memories as a child, I always remember how cosy my room was when growing up, I simply loved spending time in it. I have looked to achieve this with my boys and so our nursery designs have always been focused around creating a cosy, safe feel for our children.

My advice would be to focus on your lighting design and placement. Try setting up a small table lamp with a low glow warm white bulb, to achieve enough light to see what you’re doing without creating a stark feel to the room. Once the lighting is right then it’s time to add some soft touches, soft toys are a Nursery favourite. Personalised pillows with your babies initials always look great and soften the room perfectly.

Make it fun

I cannot emphasise enough how important this is. Make your babies room a fun place from the outset by adding baby toys, children’s books and fun activities. If you make the nursery a fun place to be and invest in spending time playing with your little one in their room, it will pay you dividends in the years to come.

My eldest son happily plays away in his room in the mornings, which creates that small window of opportunity to get some jobs around the house done or give you some time to recover from being sleep deprived.

A place to read

The bedtime story is my favourite time of the day, after a busy day at work i look forward to nothing more than putting my boys to bed and reading a classic children’s book. I can now read the Gruffalo from memory. Reading a book to your baby is a great way of achieving one on one bonding, even if you feel tired make the effort and the rewards are great. It helps with getting your baby to sleep, whilst increasing their engagement and development.

A rocking chair with a footstall is perfect for this, the motion of the chair helps set the mood for bedtime. You can place a nice small table next to the chair with a reading lamp on it. The table also comes in as a very handy place to put a bottle, when feeding.

Keep it practical

Your babies room is going to be a busy place!! remember to keep the room layout and design practical. You will be doing everything from changing nappies to bathing and bedtime routines in the same room.

Custom units can help make the most of any space. Aiding in housing baby clothes, nappies & wipes, through to toys and books.

The Shutter Studio offers great solutions for custom cabinets. Getting this right will make life a lot easier in the long run. Keeping the room clean and tidy really helps with the chaos of parenthood.

Blinds and window coverings

When it comes to the topic of sleep it’s a sore subject for any parent. All I can say is that you will need to cope without it, I found that focusing on the sleep quality rather than the hours of sleep helped us get through this difficult stage.

Your baby will be waking for regular feeds, however in-between feeds it’s important that your baby is sleeping well without any sleep problems. Window blinds are very important when configuring a nursery, there is a massive range of blinds available on the market, however in our opinion plantation shutters are the best.

Wooden shutters not only look great, but they also achieve everything you need in a nursery. Shutters are safe for children, they enable you to control the amount of light that’s coming into the room and are also available with built-in blackout blinds to achieve almost 100% blackout in the room helping to add to the amount of sleep your little one gets and you of course!

I would avoid roller blinds as they tend to rattle when the windows are open in the summer. With a breeze the blinds slowly move and hit the wall or window, this causes noise in the room and affects the sleep quality. Blinds also allow more light to enter the room in comparison to shutters, which is never a good thing when you’re trying to get your baby to sleep.

The Shutter Studio is the best local shutter company. We will work with you when measuring blinds to provide the safest, most practical window dressing for your babies room.

Ensure there is room to grow

Believe it or not, your baby won’t remain a newborn for long, so treasure every moment while you can, as you will soon miss these moments when they are gone. From my own experience, the time flies and seeing the stages that my boys have gone through, I can see how important it is to lay out a nursery that you can change as fast as your children do.

My eldest boy is soon to be 5 years old, and the only thing we have changed in his room is his bed. From Moses baskets to baby cribs and now a full-size single bed, we have adapted his room to keep up with his rapid growth.

The rest of the nursery hasn’t changed a bit, when we set up the room we made it very gender-neutral, with a layout based around making room for him to play and enjoy his bedroom.

Colour

We focused more on colour and making the room interesting, rather than a theme that was focused at a certain age. Farrow and ball colours add warmth and interest to the room such as elephant breath or skimming stone, whilst stencils were used to create a feature wall of stars.

However you decide to build your nursery, I hope my experience and ideas can help you achieve the very best start for your new arrival.