Preparing a nursery for a new baby can be an incredibly exciting task for not just you and your partner, but also for your close friends and family too. As soon as you announce your plans for your nursery space, you’ll be bombarded with generous contributions in the form of baby clothes, accessories, and decor. Read on if you want to find out how to use all these contributions, alongside your own, to create the perfect nursery that’s unique to your baby.
1. Day and night
The ideal nursery will transform from day to night, inherently introducing your baby to their daily schedule. A fantastic way of ensuring that your baby’s nursery space isn’t painfully static is simply by taking some extra time to get your windows fitted with made to measure curtains above anything else. These custom curtains will be sure to keep your baby’s room perfectly dark during naps whilst also allowing for a healthy amount of sunlight to filter in during daylight hours. You can complement natural light by using dynamic mobiles that delicately play with the sun’s rays. Alongside this, the darkness that accompanies baby’s nap times can be complemented with the incorporation of glow-in-the-dark decals or stickers, playful nightlights and gentle light dimmers, and other lightly stimulating ‘signals’ of the passing of time.
2. Inviting imagination
When designing your baby’s nursery, you’ll want to think long and hard about what you’d like the space to inspire in your newborn. This means incorporating elements into the space that can provide your baby with cognitive experiences and opportunities for independent learning.Children learn in a variety of different ways, so it’s good to play with as many different textures and themes as possible. For instance, you can fill your cot with a variety of different toys and stuffed animals and encourage your baby to play with new things every day. Alongside this, textured children’s books like ‘The Rainbow Fish’ and pop-ups, introduce your baby to the concept of morality, the vital activity that is interactive learning, and the magic of reading and story-telling. For this reason, a bookcase is a definite must-have in any magical nursery space.
3. Natural elements
Although greenery in nurseries usually isn’t a priority, incorporating some gentle houseplants into your nursery can be a fantastic way of softly introducing your baby to the outside world and to the magic of the natural world. Here’s a small list of superb house plants that can purify your nursery’s air and provide your little one with much (supervised) visual and textural stimulation.
4. Functionality
Alongside being beautiful, you should aim for your nursery to be a highly functional place. This can be done with even just a minimal level of design thinking. For instance, incorporating a toy chest into your child’s space can aid in the development of good habits like orderliness and following procedures. You want to ensure that your baby develops a good sense of maintaining their personal spaces, and that can be done quite simply by providing them with the means to find that there’s a place for everything, and everything has its own place. You can also encourage your baby to learn to adapt their nursery space to different activities as they grow older by establishing a ‘reading corner’, ‘play space’, and other ‘zones’ that can be manipulated into existence and prominence at their will.
5. Growing together
Just as the best baby car seats are those that grow with your newborn from their very first day home from the hospital to their first day of school, the best nurseries are those that are able to adapt to the changing needs of your growing child. This can be achieved by incorporating interactive elements like a growth chart and easily removable decor like well-strung fairy lights into your space, to encourage your child to pick and choose which elements they’d like to see in their room as they grow older. Speaking of growing older, a lot of young parents may have virtually no idea what to do with their taller shelf space in nursery spaces. Consider keeping your nappies, wipes, and other changing supplies on these taller shelves so that once your child is toilet-trained these shelves can be easily adapted for newer accessories.
~ If you’ve read through this entire article, you may have realised that nursery design isn’t just a task that’s shared by your family and friends, but that your child will also naturally have a lot to say about what is essentially their room! It’s all about encouraging your little one to let you know what a unique and playful nursery means to them!
