Introducing interior designer - Susan Greenman!

Choosing Childrens Bedroom Furniture and designing your child’s bedroom – tips from a professional interior designer by Susan Greenman.

Susan Greenman is the founder of East Sussex based interior design company Interior Motives. With a specialism in designing bedrooms for children and teenagers, Susannah has been in the design and decorating business for over 20 years and has a client portfolio to envy. Susan now acts as a consultant to srbWorld in the development of their childrens bedroom furniture and accessories range and has set up and trained a team of furniture advisers to provide first class advice to customers on their children’s bedroom furniture needs. Susan can be contacted via srbWorld at susang@srbworld.com .  The Cilek children’s themed bedroom furniture range can be purchased from http://www.srbworld.com./

I first met the srbWorld team nearly two years ago when I was sourcing children’s bedroom furniture. I was really excited by the Cilek children’s bedroom furniture range and since then I have introduced this range to a number of my clients. Before giving you a few of my tips for designing your childs room, I would just like to reassure you that as well as being an interior designer by profession, I’m also a mum with three children with very different design tastes. I’ve therefore lived with my designs and this has really helped me focus on just how different it is designing a childs room to any other room in your home. Here are a few of the initial things I would recommend.

1. Decide what furniture you actually need, or can fit in to the available space at the outset. Consider:

• Do you want a two or three door wardrobe (consider room for school uniforms, sports and PE kits, costumes and winter and summer clothing)?
• What style of bed do you want?  If your child is of pre-school age, Government guidelines recommend low lying beds not more than 40cms from the ground;
• Is there sufficient shelving/storage for books, CD storage and space for little ornaments or photographs?
• A desk to study at, house a computer at or simply draw or play at;
• A chair;
• A bedside table.

Do not underestimate the storage needs of a child of any age. Take a look at just what your child has managed to accrue and you will be surprised. Also think of his or her future needs and try to incorporate as much space into your original design as possible.

2. On a basic level, decide if the existing lighting and power sources are appropriate. If you need to move power points, add ceiling or wall lights or install new power sources, do this before anything else and then be sure to check that your new furniture will fit in around them as you want.

3..Involve your child in planning and designing the room as much as possible, it is their room! Clearly this will depend on the age of your child, but even four year olds can have very fixed ideas of what they want their room to look like. Choosing a theme together is really important and there are so many fantastic ones to choose from. Just keep in mind that you want a room that looks great and is a practical and functional space.  A childs room is used very differently to any other room in the house. If you think about it, the room will have a number of uses: for sleep, relaxing, playing with friends and for older children - homework. Choose furniture that facilitates as many of these as possible.

4. Most people have some limit on their available funds and so if on a budget, set a realistic one and stick to it. There is a lot of cheap bedroom furniture on the market, my recommendation is that you avoid it and buy product that won’t fall apart within the first 12 months. This is one of the key reasons I have happily recommended Cilek furniture to my clients. It is not the cheapest on the market, but represents true value and superb quality. The scratch resistant surface helps keep a room looking fresh and new for longer and few manufacturers have the confidence to match the Cilek 5 year warranty!

5. If you are ordering new furniture, obtain an expected delivery date from your supplier. You can then plan your decorating work around that. I always suggest buying any accessories that may be needed once the furniture is in place so that you can really see what is needed. With themed bedroom furniture, you will need relatively few accessories as the furniture makes a huge statement by itself. If you are buying accessories, don’t spend too much. Children will outgrow these relatively quickly and replacing accessories after 2 years or so is a cheap and effective way of updating a room so that it remains appropriate to your child’s age. There are so many good websites, not only srbWorld, that sell great room accessories. High street sales are also a great way of picking up bargains in this area.

6. It is fun to do the decorating yourself. If you are and are not that experienced, estimate how long you think it will take you and double it! This will sound really obvious but it is something I see time and time again and can make the whole process unnecessarily stressful.  In short, choose a good time to do it when young children are cared for by someone else and you are not expecting anyone to stay for a few weeks. Inevitably you child will need to move into a spare room or double up with a sibling, there is nothing worse than rushing a job because visitors are due or because Christmas or a special occasion is looming.

Happy designing!

November 2007

Susan will be publishing a second article with some great tips on designing, decorating and choosing furniture for a teenagers room shortly. She is happy to hear from anyone with design queries or simply to hear experiences of designing a room using themed bedroom furniture. Contact mailto:susang@srbWorld.com