Designing a Room to Grow with a Child

My youngest is 8 – almost 9, but she has the attitude of a full blown teenager. Not sure where she has gotten this from – perhaps it’s karma for the years of anguish I caused my parents. The world works in mysterious ways.

And now I am tasked with designing her room – something that allows her to still be a kid, but will also grow with her – without costing me a fortune.

When we purchased this house, we knew we would need need to add another bedroom. There were technically enough bedrooms, however, we wanted the second room on the main floor to be our office. Our oldest mainly lives in Toronto with her mother during the school year, but comes often on weekends, holidays and summer break. For the time being, we had converted a large storage space into a room for her, but it was far from ideal with a sloped ceiling and no windows.

While last year was focussed on the backyard and landscaping, this year is focussed on the interior. We are renovating the basement, doing some small fixes and also renovating to add the 3rd bedroom on the second floor. Where we were limited to two locations in which we could build the room, due to available windows, but in the end, we chose the planned location because it meant that both Taliah & Maelie could then share the current storage area (Kloe’s temporary room), which we will convert into a big walk in closet. Kloe will then take Maelie’s room.

So I had drawn up all the plans, and post demolition, Tom has taken the lead on doing the actual renovation, while I have been focussed on planning the decor. Of course Maelie already had basic furniture, a bed (and bedding), a chest of drawers, but not much else. I had borrowed a nightstand from Taliah who had two and she didn’t have much other furniture.

Now Maelie is a very interesting little 8 year old. The youngest of the girls, she has picked up a lot of diva-like behaviour lately. While super sweet sometimes, she can also turn hand give you the biggest dose of attitude – far bigger than her actual size. She also has a very high pitched and powerful voice, which she uses quite a lot. And while we don’t condone this behaviour at all, we still have to live with it.

But it really got me thinking about what I selected for her room. I mean, she is going to be 9, for sure she needs something that she can grow into as well, not just a typical young girls room. So everything I was choosing was a bit more mature. Luckily, she was into it.

Now there are 3 things that will remain in Maelie’s room from her current room – her bed, her chest of drawers and bedding…and that’s it. Aside from that, everything else is a blank slate. So what I decided to do is bring in a bit more warmth to the room using wood tones and warm coloured prints.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of what I chose and why, here are the principles I used, and you can too, to ensure you have a design or decor that can last.

1. Unless you love to paint, choose a neutral colour. Whites, Off-whites, soft greys, etc allow you to more easily change up the decor scheme if needed.
2. Use decor items to give the space its personality – throws and cushions can add the color scheme, along with colourful storage solutions like baskets, boxes and shelves.
3. Use art rather than a trendy character – as much as your child may like it at the moment, they will be over it quite quickly
4. The more you put in a space, the more your kids will fill it – opt for a more minimalistic approach in a kids room.

After over 10 years of redecorating and renovating the girls rooms, these are the learnings I’ve had and what I now use to design any updates. Now add into the mix the complexity of keeping the historic style of our 100 year old house – and it give a little less options. However, I think that I have been able to find the perfect mix with the house style, my existing pieces and the vision for the room.

Now, into the details.

Her bed was previously Taliah’s from IKEA, to which they don’t have the same model anymore. The most similar model I could find is this one below, with the drawers. We removed the drawers as we found that the more storage space we gave the girls for their “toys, etc”, the more junk those drawers collected.

I also like this bed from IKEA, its your basic Hemnes – but you know me, I’m a huge fan of the Hemnes collection from IKEA.

Maelie’s current bedding, which I purchased from Simon’s in the fall (and is no longer available), but you have a small peek of it in the picture of her current room.

Of course that is paired with the Hemnes Chest of Drawers.

We will use Dulux Garlic Clove for the wall colour. Three reasons:

1. It’s a warm off-white which will help tone down the cool white tones in the existing furniture.
2. It’s a very close match to the other rooms upstairs and I felt it was extremely important to keep consistency throughout the house in terms of wall color. I feel that its helping to preserve this history
3. We still have a lot left over from the mudroom (and pantry) LOL!

First, the nightstand, of course I don’t want to spend a ton of money on furniture for kids – any time I have – I have regretted it. So the one shown is from IKEA (linked here) – I may stain it to be slightly warmer but we will see once I can get my hands on it. Unfortunately I can’t do click and collect here yet, and I’m not paying $65 in shipping in the meantime. I had found one on the Urban Outfitters US site that would have worked well – but it doesn’t ship to Canada and Maelie actually preferred this one – so it saved me money.

What I like about this nightstand is the multiple shelves in addition to the drawers, while still looking clean. Once I get my hands on it, after non-essential services open back up, both Maelie and I will be excited to style this.

The floors on the entire second floor are mostly original and quite beat up – but we love the vintage look of them. However, that means that an area rug in the room is almost a necessity for some comfort on the feet. I loved the Loloi runner that I got a couple of weeks ago, and the rug we chose is essentially the same thing but from Overstock (and less expensive).

The shelf from Urban Outfitters is one of the pieces that I centralized my design off of. I love the combination of form and function, especially for a kid. Unfortunately the mirror broke during transport – as of now I’m still dealing with Customer Service on next steps (mainly I haven’t had time to call yet) but I’m sure it will be resolved. I absolutely love this and so does Maelie.

The prints are all Canadian artists and I purchased them off Etsy (linked below). Super fun – I love the rainbow ones as I think its a great reminder of this time we are going through right now (COVID-19) and the tones are exactly what I wanted for the room.

The frames are from Zone Maison – a local company here in Montreal. I was really struggling to find something so simple. I know I would have found it in a store, but with nothing open I had to hunt for it online at a reasonable price. I’ve linked them here

For the light fixture, this was a tough one. I originally wanted the ceilings to be renovated to look exactly like the other two bedrooms, which come to a peak in the centre. However, this would have been A LOT more work, so we had to keep the current ceiling configuration which is a lot lower. This limited my lighting options so in keeping with the historic theme, I used the same light fixtures from our bedroom from Wayfair – rustic but still a clean look.

And there you have it, all the details on how we will be styling the new room. There is still A LOT of work to do – but we are hoping to finish in the next two weeks (since we only work on it on the weekends). Then it will be onto finishing the guest “bedroom”. The closet will likely wait until the fall as we want to be able to enjoy the summer outdoors and its not an urgency at the moment.

I think its the perfect combo of little girl energy, with the ability to grow with the space without needing a complete redesign in a couple of years – with maybe the exception of the sloth comforter 😉 I mean, sloths ARE cool, but maybe not on bedding.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section below! Thanks for following along.

KRISTIN