Are you planning to start a family soon? It is a great time to start planning the nursery room for your baby. And if you're planning to have more than one child, or you are keeping the gender a surprise until birth, you might want to do a gender neutral nursery room.
Ideally nursery room location would be in the bedroom right next to the master bedroom. Every parent would prefer to be close to their newborn for safety reasons and able to check on them occasionally. Once your first born child gets little older, you would want to move your first child to different bedroom and reuse the nursery room for your second born child.
Once you move your first child to different bedroom, you wouldn't have to spend too much on redecorate the nursery room since it would have everything what you need but can make some minor changes to make it special for each of your child such as different bedding, pillows, add few new items that you needed but didn't have it on your first born child, or even change the wall arts. It would save you lots of money on re-purposing the nursery room for each of your child. However, most parents tend to reuse the crib, changing table/dresser, and rocking chair for each child but often spend more money on redecorate the entire nursery room which only last for a couple years. That's why gender neutral nursery room works best only if you want to save money and able to make the space special for each of your child regardless what gender your child is.
In the past year, I have helped two clients to design the gender neutral nursery rooms. You can get an idea of how it looks like and able to reuse it for your next child and beyond. Here is the example of our works:
You can see what things both gender neutral nursery rooms have in common from these style boards. Neutral color furniture (white, black, and natural wood) that would work with any other colors and you can change a color and it still would look good with those furniture. Wall colors would stay neutral such as light gray, cream, off white, or beige but it would be ok to have an accent wall with completely different color and you can more easily change the accent wall color for each child if you like. It is also ok to have neutral colors with some pops of colors as well that are easily replaceable with little fuss or cost. It is common thoughts for some people that neutral colors mean boring but it is not always true for many cases. It can be a fun and cozy space for your baby with a bit of sophistication for the parents. :)
You probably are wondering what about designing the bedroom for first child and beyond once you move them to different bedroom(s). We will discuss about this matter in our next blog. :)