I recently had the pleasure of getting to design a playroom for a young family. My clients recently added built-ins and beautiful wainscoting to an office that was adjacent to their living room. They have a young son and are hoping to have another baby down the road so they decided that a better use of the "office space" for them would be to use it as a playroom. They were also hoping to reclaim some of their living room from the toy zone that was slowly taking over. Because the space is adjacent to the living room and is one of the first spaces you can see when you come into the home, it was important for them to have it look nice in addition to housing toys.
Here is a look at the space when we started:
After our initial consultation, our plan was for me to source the following items:
rug
kid table and chairs
curtains and hardware
art
cabinet knobs for built-ins
accessories for shelves
The Dad of the family travels quite a bit so my client suggested that she would like to potentially have a map as the art in the room so that she could talk to her son about where Daddy was in his travels. She also indicated that she liked to have some natural wood elements to keep the space warm (which I completely agreed with!). So, with those two elements in mind, I dove in.
Here were the design elements I sourced that ultimately made it into the space:
We had approximately a $2K budget for the space and we stayed pretty true to that. I knew those shelves were going to EAT UP accessories because of the sheer number of them so I sourced A LOT of accessories so that we would have options to play around with. Even knowing how many accessories we would need, we ended up using almost everything I brought. What I sourced for the shelves was a mix of affordable HomeGoods and big box store finds as well as several vintage accessories and plants/greenery of course! Thankfully she loved it all! My client is extremely happy with how the space turned out and so am I!
We intentionally left a lot of the floor space blank for additional larger toys as her son grows (ie play kitchen, train table, etc.) and may incorporate a reading nook down the road. But for now, he has a super cushy and happy space to play in. And we finished the whole space up in one month - just in time for this little guy's first birthday!
xo, Cameron
