D esigning Ettie’s room been my favourite part of our renovation journey to date. The inner child in me has taken over designing a space I would have loved as a child, and this room is probably the reason some of our other rooms aren’t finished.. because it’s been taking all my wages!
There’s still a little way to go before I’d say its ‘finished’ and I write a complete room tour, but I think we’ve made enough progress now to give a little sneak peek & show you where it’s heading.
This was how her room started out. There was a diagonal chimney breast in the far left corner of the room which made it a funny shape for furniture. The room had a picture rail, original wooden pelmet on the window and the walls were covered with cut out pictures of wildlife.
We removed the chimney breast (and the pictures of the birds!), skimmed the walls and laid a new carpet giving me a completely blank canvas from which to begin.
I also worked though what felt like a million shades of pink, trying to find the right colour for the wall. Eventually we settled on Blush Pink by Dulux which is a lovely soft peachy pink.
Painting her room seemed to take an eternity because I was fitting it in between working full time and looking after an increasingly energetic toddler! Because time was limited I painted the walls one at a time whenever I managed to find a spare hour or two.
The next stage was to create a feature wall. Because pink can be quite overwhelming, I didn’t want her room to appear too sickly sweet and so I used black wall stickers to give it a bit of an edge. I love clean, crisp lines and realky love the result, particularly because the black dots seem to line up with the knobs on the draws which I thought was pretty neat.
I really love how her room is turning out. She turns two in a couple of months and so we’re likely to be changing the cot into a big girls bed. I’m not sure what that means in terms of the layout, so thought it would be nice to document what it looks like now while it is still a nursery.
The theme for Ettie’s room kind of evolved over time. When she was first-born, we lived in a two bedroom flat but decided to keep the second bedroom a guest room so my parents had somewhere to stay when they visited. Because of that we didn’t have a ‘nursery’ so to speak and bought only a few token items which we displayed on a shelf in the guest room above her little clothes rail.
One of the first things I bought was this wooden stacking rainbow from Pixistuff which I absolutely love. I really like the simplicity of white mixed with pops of rainbow colours, specifically pastel rainbow colours and so this is the colour scheme I went for when I set about collecting items for her room. The next thing I bought was this beautiful handcrafted mobile from Velveteen Babies.
Coral’s account is one of my favourites on Instagram and at the time she was making fully personalised mobiles and drop garlands. I contacted her with the colour scheme I had in mind and we decided to create a rainbow with pink for the outer layer as opposed to red so that it fit the room a little better. I made that order almost three years ago now, and yet this is still one of my favourite items in Ettie’s room. I love the colours and the beautiful hand sewn faces on the clouds. I think if I was a little girl, I would have lots of happy dreams if those were the last faces I seen at night.
I’ve tried to make it as personalised as possible adding in little treasures where possible such as the handmade banner name banner from Daydreams and Dandelions and the wooden train set spelling out her name.
The Pear Parum poster was actually from our bedroom in our old flat but I think it works really well in this space and the Borrowers boots are in homage to her full name which is Arrietty (the main character from the books).
Finally the Teepee and reading area are there to indulge my childhood dreams. I absolutely LOVED making Dens when I was younger, hiding away from the rest of the world, often with a book by Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton so what better than to create Ettie her own real life den in her room! I’ve made it really cosy by adding a string of fairy lights over the top and sometimes in the evening we sneak in there to have a snuggle and read our bedtime story which is just lovely. My intention is to kit it out with lots of different textures including a monochrome playmat and sheepskin rug but for now we’re just using this quilt from Zara Home.
The bookshelves are from Jo Jo Maman Bebe and are just the right length to fill the space, although I am debating changing them to the wooden ones from Ikea. Eventually I’ll add a beanbag or something to the area below the shelves to fill the space up a bit more.
So there you have it, still very much a work in progress but you can see where its headed. The next area I’ll be working on is that space underneath the book cases and I might get a few extra posters for the wall. Once thats all finished I’ll probably write this post again and but call it a room tour!
Watch this space xx
You can find the full tour of Ettie’s completed room here: A modern, pink, scandi inspired girls room
