Choosing Colors For Children’s Bedrooms

Choosing Colors For Children’s Bedrooms

Choosing colors for children’s bedrooms should be fun, an enjoyable experience, until you have to do it for your children. Children now are allowed to have a mind of their own and their own opinion, and boy do they have a lot of opinions. Unfortunately they change their mind like the wind and are the worst clients ever!

So how do you handle choosing colors for children’s bedrooms?

Here is how I am about to handle my daughter’s bedroom. We are about to have her room repainted due to the earthquake damage, so I said, foolishly, go and pick a paint color that you like, knowing that it is a 2 minute job for me. Well, she fell asleep on the paint fandeck with three colors sticking out of it. Lime green, ice blue and a cream with an orange tint. Having the skills and experience I do with color, I instantly dismissed all three as she has hot pink curtains and candy striped blinds with pink and mint green. Then the painter arrives for me to give him the paint colors…..what do I do? She is at school, no discussion over the paint colors happened this morning, I need to make a decision and I do. A lovely pale dusky blue for her bedroom and her brothers. Way off from what she had picked I know, but I also know my daughter and this is actually her favorite color. I also know that when you choose colors for a children’s bedroom, that by the time they have filled it up with all their “stuff” you barely see the wall color anyway. So the painter is coming back tomorrow to start the job, we will wait and see how she handles it, but at the end of the day, I know that I have made the right choice. I will be the worst mother in the world for not letting her choose it, she will hate me, but I am used to that when she doesn’t get her own way, and at the blink of an eyelid, I’m the best mother in the world again! Children change their mind like the wind, and have very short memories.

So to summarize, here are my quick tips for choosing children’s bedroom colors:

• Keep it simple, children have so much stuff that a great wallpaper, or well planned paint scheme or mural is often lost in the room.
• Find a color that will withstand children’s trends. (Pink is a little girls favorite color, then bang over night when you least expect it, pink is the last color they want to see, they won’t wear it and will hate having it painted on their walls). Using a neutral color on the walls and then adding the color in the accessories is the best way to manage this, the bed linen is much easier and cost effective to change than repainting or wallpapering. 
• Adding color and design with a wallpaper frieze or border is a way to decorate for their age that can be changed reasonably easily.
• Putting feature colors in a floor rug is a great way to jazz up the space, and kids love to lie on them.
• Add colored bean bags and cushions. These items are easy to replace or recover.
• Stripes are an excellent design choice as they tend to be more timeless than Pooh Bear, Thomas the Tank Engine, Princesses or Fairies. Especially with a more expensive facet of decoration like curtains or blinds, upholstered chairs or sofas.
• Using the current trend of wall art that you and just stick on and peel off when you need a change is a great way to decorate, and you can let kids pick their own with this item.
• In general, selecting a neutral base does sound like a cop out, but unless you want to be constantly redecorating children’s bedrooms, then I would recommend this option.
• When it comes to furniture, I would also recommend as above, choosing a neutral finish like timber, or white, grey, cream or black. This way you have so many more options for choosing colors to go with the furniture, and you will get more use from the furniture. I know there are so many gorgeous children’s furniture sets available. I learnt from experience with one of our children, my son, that after only two years in his really great bunk bed he has outgrown it, hates it and wants a normal timber bed like his sister.
• Picture frames are a fabulous way to change colors and design. Buy some simple frames and then you can put in pictures, photos, children’s art work, old birthday cards, anything that the children like really to change the decor on a regular basis. I do it with our children and it is fun for everyone. We hang them on the walls and when we are tired of them we choose a rainy day to sit down and change them.

If you hate all my advice and have the resources to change your child’s bedroom on a regular basis, then go for it, do some research with your child to get a feel for what they like, show them pictures in magazines, visit retail stores and see beds made up, they often have show bedrooms to look at, and it will give you some ideas on what they want and what you think will work for them.

The most important aspect of creating your child’s bedroom is making it a comfortable, fun and safe place for them to live in, a space that they can personalize and call their own. Then with a bit of luck they might be so proud of it that they keep it clean and tidy. I am still working on that theory!

You may want to get some bedroom color ideas for children from here.
Children’s bedroom decorating tips

If you want to learn more about color and creating color schemes we have a great course for you. Color for interiors – go check it out today!