Few rooms prove as much fun to decorate as nurseries for baby girls. You can make them as soft, sweet and frilly as you like without making the males in your home feel uncomfortable. While the traditional pale pink color is nearly always charming and a good starting choice, take your baby girl's room a step further with comprehensive nursery decorating ideas that turn the entire room into a girlish paradise.
Shabby Chic
If any decorating style lends itself to decorating a baby girl's room, it's shabby chic. Start with pale, painted walls in pink, cream, aqua or classic white. Use glossy white on the woodwork.
Paint an ornate ceiling medallion to match and hang a petite chandelier. Choose painted, Italian tole or something sparkly and dripping with crystals. Lay a faded Aubusson carpet or floral, hooked rug on the floor.
Choose a new baby bed that looks old, with curvy lines and faux-distressed paint. For the other furniture--chest, side tables or dresser--select antiques that were grand in a former life. Paint them white or palest pink, and distress them by sanding the points of natural wear.
Make curtains, throw pillows and a baby bed skirt from vintage floral fabrics in cotton, linen and barkcloth. Add sweet dressmaker details like ruffles and box pleats. Use crisp white cotton for your baby's bedding, and then slipcover your rocker to match.
Chinoiserie
When many people think of chinoiserie--which refers to Chinese-inspired decorative arts--they imagine stark red and black. While true in some cases, many chinoiserie designs have soothing, soft colors just perfect for a baby girl's nursery. The designs are often scenic, featuring trees, budding branches, birds and flowers. Adding chinoiserie elements makes your nursery sweetly sophisticated. The look can grow with your daughter or it can convert easily to other styles.
To start, cover the walls with a delicately-colored chinoiserie wallpaper or fabric. Add a white, lacquered cabinet to hold clothing and supplies. Above it, hang a chinoiserie-style mirror that looks like bamboo.
Choose a baby bed and other furniture with classic lines, perhaps straight-lined Chippendale or curvier, formal French. Make curtains and bedding from solid fabrics that repeat the colors from your walls. Add a blanc de Chine porcelain lamp to the table next to your rocking chair and hang a silver or gilt pagoda chandelier overhead.
Classic Fairy Tales
If you'd like to give your baby girl's room a more fanciful look, try a nursery inspired by classic fairy tales. Paint the walls white, pink or pale gray. Add trompe l'oeil archways with castle-like stone surrounds. Take them all the way to the floor. Inside each, paint a scene from a different fairy tale--as if you could enter the various stories as they unfold.
Though the arches will definitely steal the show, scatter other fairy tale touches throughout the room. Hang flowing curtains on the windows and add a matching canopy over the crib.
If you don't like the carpet, rip it up and faux-finish the concrete floor to match your archway stones. Look for an antique Gothic or Baroque armoire to hold clothing and baby supplies, and hang a grand, castle-worthy chandelier to light the room.
References
- Stan Carpenter; Carpenter & Carpenter Designs; Memphis, Tennessee
- Wayne Shielly; Bartlett Home Furnishings; Memphis, Tennessee
- Apartment Therapy: Incorporating Chinoiserie into the Home
- "Shabby Chic"; Rachel Ashwell; 1996
- Fromental: Room Pictures
