My daughter Kitty is now 9 years old and officially hates her gorgeous vintage bedroom that we created when she was a baby. She hates the room that you all love, and that appeared in my book and in various magazines such as HomeStyle, Real Homes and Psychologies. For anyone that didn’t see it, have a look here and here. Everything in it was vintage, from the wallpaper, to the dolls, the furniture to the toys. Sad face 🙁
But hey, life moves on and so does the taste of my daughter. One rule that I made for the room though is that the vintage wallpaper had to stay. It has been there since the 1960s and we love it (Kitty doesn’t) but as this room may one day be the spare room, we agreed that it should stay. We decided to pull out one of the colours in the pattern to use on the walls which she was adamant had to be blue. We teamed up with the team at Valspar Paint who gifted us the paint and chose their Blue Chiffon colour. As you can see we have painted the skirtings in the same colour after trialing this in our lounge. It makes the walls feel taller as they have not been broken up by the classic white skirting that we all feel that we should do.
We also pulled out the duck egg colour in the wallpaper for a few accessories such as the blinds and the fluffy rug. As much as it looked nice – it all felt a bit matchy matchy.
I gave Kitty the choice of adding a bright colour such as yellow or bright pink – she looked at me as if I was mad! She chose pink and this is where we started to have some fun. We added a bright pink vintage style lamp and light shade very similar to ones I had in the 1980s.
We spray painted a set of vintage hooks bright pink too.
The rug reminds me of the 90s and brings all the colours together.
The duvet set is from Ikea and again brings all the colours together. The shelf and furniture is also from Ikea – we chose the dark green metal unit for the end of the bed wanting to add few less feminine pieces.
Finally we created a collage of inspirational feminist quote postcards bought from Etsy. Kitty chose them and Fries Before Guys is her favourite – a mantra that we can all believe in no matter what our age! The cards are by A Spoonful of Sugar Co, Bagging Around , L Walker Illustration and Emmy Lupin Studio. The neon sign adds another splash of colour and fun.
She now has a much more grown up (non vintage) room that suits her personality so much. She spends more time up there and is soon to have friends to stay as the single bed has a pull out bottom bed to it (genius idea!).
And we sold the vintage toys (we still have some left) so other children can enjoy them!
Huge thanks to Valspar for this project.
