The secret to a great bedroom? It’s child’s play
Getting youngsters involved in the design of their little corner of the home will see their inspiration soar, writes Jessica Doyle
The question of how to get children off their screens and into practical, creative pursuits is an increasingly pressing one. The World Health Organisation’s current advice is that children between the ages of two and five should have no more than one hour of screen time a day, but as the days get shorter and the weather less appealing, what can you do to encourage screen-free play? The answer could lie not only in outdoors pursuits, but also in the way their bedrooms and playrooms are decorated and furnished.
The homeware company Swoon (swooneditions.com) has just launched Little Creatives, its first collection of children’s furniture, which Debbie Williamson, the brand’s co-founder, was inspired to develop after watching a TED talk about creativity.
“It really got me thinking about my nieces,” she says. “Creativity is not just about design and art, it’s about problemsolving and invention. We were looking at producing a line of storage, and I thought, rather than us thinking we know what children want, why don’t we get them to help with the process?”
To come up with the designs, Williamson and her team held a workshop in tandem with design studio Tilt, where groups of children played with colour and materials and chatted to designers about the kind of furniture they wanted in their rooms. The design team went away and created prototypes, then held a further workshop to see how the children interacted with the products.
“The way kids look at furniture is pure; they think in a very functional way,” says Sam Baldry, Swoon’s head of design. “A desk doesn’t need to be static, it just needs to have a surface, and that surface doesn’t have to be flat.
“Things can be on wheels, and desktops can stand up. We asked them what they thought a trolley should look like, for example [the answer was, naturally, a monster], and they all loved the idea of secret functions, and multifunctional pieces.”
One little girl, Aiyla, wanted a secret place to read books and draw, so the coat rack named after her can be easily transformed into a den, over which a sheet can be thrown to create a little tent. The Freddie desk has a lid that flips up and becomes an easel on one side – with a shelf for holding brushes and paints – and a blackboard on the other; while the Fynne desk has a tray top that conceals hidden storage inside, and can be lifted off completely if its owner wants to sit on the sofa or bed to draw.
Interior designer Anna Burles, founder of design studio Run for the Hills (runforthehills.com), watched the same TED talk mentioned by Williamson, and was similarly inspired to use design as a tool to unlock children’s creativity. At the Decorex design fair in London earlier this week, she created a dreamlike children’s room set that was fantastical in some respects – a Princess and the Pea-style bed made of a stack of mattresses and a balloonfilled ceiling, for example – as well as demonstrating other ideas that could be more easily transferred into a home setting, such as incorporating foliage patterns and real plants into the design.
“Reconnecting children with nature is so important,” says Burles. “Art and creativity is one thing, but science and nature is another, it really inspires them. We put lots of planting into this room to bring the outdoors in, because you can’t always go outside. My five-year-old daughter has a bug hotel that we made together – just a jar with holes in the lid – which she loves. You can get them to decorate plant pots, too.”
Getting children involved in the design and decoration of their own rooms is also, Burles believes, a fun and engaging way to get them to think creatively and in a problem-solving way.
She previously worked with the education charity Inspire!, working with children on the interior design of their bedrooms – which was in fact a maths exercise in disguise. “They measured their rooms and their furniture, worked out where things could go, and made mood boards,” she says. “It was a fun exercise, but taught them how measuring and maths are important skills for life. It was amazing how well they did it when it was tied in with creativity; they got so excited about it, because it was so personal to them.
“If you make it about the child, you can unlock a lot. It’s also an opportunity to teach them how to customise and reuse something, by repainting it, drawing on it or decorating it with stickers.” This concept of children customising their own spaces was similarly behind the new children’s furniture brand Pea (frompea.com), providing themed collections of children’s furniture inspired by the outside world. Along with reversible bedding and personalised posters, there are wall-sticker and stencil sets that match the motifs and colours in the fabrics and furniture.
It was also what led the wallpaper designer Sian Zeng (sianzeng.com) to come up with her innovative magnetic wallpapers, which have just won the Etsy Grand Prize, a global design award. “The idea for it really stemmed from my final year project at university,” says Zeng. “I was writing about Little Red Riding Hood and how the story had evolved and been retold in different ways over the centuries, and I was curious to see how people would tell a story differently with the same cast of characters on an interactive wall.”
There are six scenic designs and 58 different magnets for children to play with, as well as speech bubbles that they can write on to leave messages around the home. As Zeng puts it, “By creating a space with fantasy and imagination, you can help your child to let their creativity fly.”