Kidswatch

When I started doing this interior design malarkey eight years ago, I mostly did children’s bedrooms. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do rooms for grown ups, it just seemed to me that children’s rooms where a lot more fun to do…

When I started doing this interior design malarkey eight years ago, I mostly did children’s bedrooms. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do rooms for grown ups, it just seemed to me that children’s rooms where a lot more fun to do.

It’s where my company name comes from as well. Bedlam. My husband said, all those years ago, that bedlam was a good reflection of both my home life, and my work life! And even though I do fewer children’s rooms now, and more grown up rooms – it is still the thing that brings me the greatest joy, and is still the most fun! And it is still bedlam as well…

As you can well imagine, colour really comes into its own with children’s rooms. People often ask me about over-stimulating children with colour – I unfortunately don’t hold with that. Half of Scandinavia would have hyperactive children if I did as they have a great love of strong colour, and use it liberally where children are concerned.

I also don’t hold with the whole load of tosh about only using light colours in small spaces. Half the world lives in rooms smaller than ours and they still embrace colour and pattern. We seem to love to live in large empty rooms with beige or black/white on the walls. A friend of mine many years ago (he was/is a designer) gave me a great piece of advice when people think a particular colour will make a room look dark; Turn the lights on! If bright and clean is what you want – paint it white. If you want to play with colour and texture – be open minded with the way you handle it.

My daughter wants (as most teenagers do) her room to be painted black next time we do it. It’s a small room, but we will do it black and it will be amazing – it’s a small room, and I don’t care. I will do one wall with RESENE blackboard paint and let her go mad on it with chalkboard pens (rather than the chalk itself – it leaves dust everywhere and is never a perfect clean black after its first wipe down!)

This wallpaper I am featuring this month is quite simply divine. If my eldest daughter was suddenly five again, (and not as tomboyish as she actually is), I would do her whole room in this wallpaper. This comes from a Danish company Pip Studios and as well as wallpaper they do china and homewares, as well as bedding. I will let you know where you can get the other things that are actually available in NZ in next month’s column.

The wallpaper is available though the gorgeous Paper Room (www.paperroom.co.nz) which has a wonderful range of wallpapers, decals and all things for our walls. The wallpaper is called Pip Studio Chinese Rose; it comes in a 10m roll and is $169. I have used wallpapers that I have loved in the past, when the cost is a little prohibitive, on one wall. I have also put the paper into big picture frames and hung several on a white wall as a feature. I also once made a bed head by pasting the wallpaper on a wall where a bed head would be… just a thought. I have seen the backs of doors wallpapered as well…

Continuing on with the theme of bedrooms… most of the children’s furniture you get at the moment is sleek, and white. This is great in an all white house, but often doesn’t work well for boys (or an eclectic home). My quiet son has white bunks – but then he would rather read a Tintin book that bash a drum kit! For those boys (and girls – I have a tomboy – what was I thinking limiting this to just boys…) who are hard on their surroundings, this set of bunks by REMNANT in Hamilton, is just perfect.

Made out of reclaimed timber, they have a great authenticity about them. REMNANT have just featured in the latest Inside Out magazine as they have done much of the furniture for the commercial fit outs of the Federation/Minti stores here in Auckland (pictured below), and in the designers’, Nick and Jenny Clegg, home on the North Shore.

They have a gorgeous ‘picket fence’ bed that was made for the Clegg’s daughter Ryder. A bed for a girl with an edge!

Sharlene and Scott Woolston own REMNANT and they know a thing or two about robust furniture with 4 boys of their own – the bunks in the picture belong to their eldest two, George and Oscar. Dallas of Art with Aroha Ltd based in Hamilton did the fabulous graffiti art behind the bed. When I want graffiti on my walls (which my daughter desperately does) – that is definitely whom I am going to call. This piece of work was done onto hardboard and then screwed to the wall itself. Contact Dallas on 0210292501. The bunks are $2200, contact REMNANT through their website www.remnant.co.nz. Or look for them on their Facebook page.

I do like (where possible) to include a thing or two that doesn’t cost the earth in my column each month. The things I generally include are things I just love. That is my only rule for inclusion. Some of them I own, some of them I WISH to own, some I can only ever dream of owning. The next two things are cheap as chips, well one is cheap, the other accessible, so they are easy things to own. Actually both I own. Sometimes people lend me things to photograph – but other times I just put my money where my mouth is, and actually just include things I have bought. Wall decals are an incredibly easy way to add colour and energy to a room. These dinosaur decals were a tiny $5 with any purchase at Cotton On Kids. Yep – just $5! I have test driven them on my son’s wall and they have adhered to the wall well, and haven’t peeled off the paint when I have removed them – so that is a bonus. They don’t show up well on our Kelly green walls – and would probably look a lot better on a lighter (read white) wall!

After colour in kids’ bedrooms, my next favourite topic is order. My theory is that kids have way more stuff than we ever did as children, and it is a tall ask to want them to keep their space organised. Our job, as parents, is to help them have a place for things to return to. Not a vague sort of “doesn’t it live in the cupboard?” place, but a “All my comics live in that box” sort of organised. My kids are frantic drawers. They draw with pencils on A4 paper – and everything is tiny and complicated (BOTH of the boys I might add). There are pencils EVERYWHERE and paper coming out of my ears. When a drawing is finished it either goes in a folder with plastic pockets if the picture is a ‘keeper or in the bin if it isn’t up to their own level of perfection (whatever that is).

I bought this M which I assume is for magazines, but which we use to keep all the paper they need. The amount of people who have seen it and rushed out and bought one – is just silly! They come from TYPO – there is one in St Lukes here in Auckland and it is $25.

Oli Blocks might seem a strange thing to include in an interiors column, but I am just continuing with my ‘I love it so I will include it’ theme. We started our love affair with visual puzzles/blocks when we had a beach house with limited TV reception. We eventually got it fixed, but we never told the children… during the years we rented that bach we played a lot of games. We played cards and made puzzles. I especially loved going in the winter, and even though our place was tiny (it really was), being stuck inside was less of a chore when there were things to keep them occupied. The children’s creations often got left on a table or a shelf and ended up being a decoration that would stay until the constructor decided to remake it into something else.

Oli Blocks hail from the US and I saw them years ago in a waiting room of all places, and have been trying to find them ever since. I even tried in my last trip to the States and couldn’t find them. So imagine my surprise to find them in the shop Zany in Remuera, here in Auckland. They are both magnetic, and they fit into one another. They don’t make into traditional shapes – they just end up being very sculptural and organic. They were designed by architect Daniel Oakley as a building toy to help children see past the traditional constraints of building blocks – he designed the original 4 shapes to interlink. The child is only constrained by their imagination. We have ended up with 4 sets and the kids get stroppy if I don’t display their ‘works of art’ around the house – so currently there are various versions of these blocks all over the house. They are for children from 4 years and up and cost $35 per set. You can buy them either in the traditional colours, or in a resin finish. They also come with an add-on pack if you want to introduce some new shapes. So toddle off to Zany, 419 Remuera Rd, phone them on 09 520 6003 or email them at robyn@zany.co.nz.

Ok I am going to finish this month with what appears to me to be the most impractical but glorious children’s décor book I have ever had the pleasure of owning. And I do actually own this book. Some books are sent to me to review, but this one I had to own the minute I laid eyes on it! Room for Children – Stylish Spaces for Sleep and Play by Susanna Salk is wonderfully colourful – but is in fact what happens when one has no limits when designing children’s rooms.

It makes no room (so to speak) for the practical aspects of children (ie their own personalities, storage, flexibility of use etc) but it is still full of wonderful ideas to steal. No rooms are ever this tidy (this is always an issue with décor books) – and there are hardly any children even in the photographs, but I have marvelled at the world maps on the walls, the hanging curtain divider, the divine use of colour, the adding together of several cheap rugs to make a larger more impressive one… all ideas I can use. This book is aspirational – in all the right ways. The book is by Rizzoli New York, and is carried by Flying Kiwi. Phone them on 5358335 for stockists. Its RRP is $95.

By Anya Brighouse, 4 June 2011.