Fairies in Green from Fairyland by Borastapeter, a leafy green print in a child's room with a deep red bunk bed, a canopy and a pendant light
Decorating Notes

The Nursery You Won't Have to Redo: Wallpaper That Grows With Your Child

By Wallpaper Sales

The nursery is the room we most often over-commit, and most often regret. Choose with a longer view, and a gender-neutral instinct, and you can decorate a room your child will love at six months and at six years.

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The first instinct, faced with a nursery, is to reach for pink or blue and a scattering of cartoon characters. It is also the instinct most worth resisting. Gendered, baby-specific schemes date almost immediately, and tie a room to a single stage, and a single assumption, that your child will quickly outgrow.

It is no surprise that so many parents now look specifically for gender-neutral nursery ideas: not out of ideology, but out of good sense and good taste. A room that does not shout its colours is calmer to spend the small hours in, more flattering in photographs, and far easier to evolve as a tiny baby becomes an opinionated five-year-old.

"The happiest nurseries are not baby rooms. They are lovely rooms that happen, for now, to have a cot in them."

Steer by palette as much as by pattern. The warm, nature-drawn tones feel timeless and calm where sugary pastels tip quickly into the twee: Stratus in Sage Green, from 1838's V&A Decorative Papers III, Falling Foss in Sage from Scion's Oakham, the soft ochre of Sol & Måne from Galerie's Resan, and the scattered birds of Frida in Olive Green, from Sandberg's Familjen. None of them is a baby pattern, and that is rather the point.

Stratus in Sage Green from V and A Decorative Papers III by 1838 Wallcoverings, a soft scalloped cloud pattern above a pale wooden sideboard

Stratus, Sage Green by 1838 Wallcoverings

Falling Foss in Sage from Oakham by Scion, a fine sage line drawing of leaves and hills behind a cane console with a lamp and a plant

Falling Foss, Sage by Scion

Sol and Mane in Beige from Resan by Galerie, a gentle ochre sun and moon print in a child's room with a white bed and wooden toys

Sol & Måne, Beige by Galerie

Olive Green Frida from Familjen by Sandberg, small white birds scattered on olive in a bedroom with a rocking chair and a window

Frida, Olive Green by Sandberg

What Actually Grows With a Child

The secret is to choose a subject with a long life in it, something a baby finds soothing and an older child still finds charming. Nature is the great evergreen here: a gentle woodland, a sky of drifting clouds as in Bonnie in Graphite, a trailing leaf or a soft botanical like Vilhelmina. A night sky does the same work: Midnight Skies in Ivory, from Rockett St George, scatters terracotta stars across a warm ground and is as good in a grown-up study as it is over a cot.

Animals and birds enchant at every age, and so do the quiet structural patterns, a small geometric, a stripe, a scallop, that read as grown-up rather than babyish: Tulip Trellis is one of those. These are the designs that will still look right when the cot becomes a bed and the soft toys give way to Lego. You are not decorating for a baby, but for the child they are about to become.

"Choose a subject a baby finds soothing and a six-year-old still finds charming."

Graphite Bonnie from Familjen by Sandberg, soft drifting clouds across a bedroom wall and ceiling above a pale bed

Bonnie, Graphite by Sandberg

Green Vilhelmina from Familjen by Sandberg, painted herbs and wild flowers growing up the wall of a child's room with a small desk

Vilhelmina, Green by Sandberg

Midnight Skies in Ivory by Rockett St George, terracotta stars scattered across a pale ground above a bamboo table with a candle

Midnight Skies, Ivory by Rockett St George

Tulip Trellis in Coast Blue from Oakham by Scion, a small blue trellis geometric behind a wooden console with a lamp and a plant

Tulip Trellis, Coast Blue by Scion

Timeless Need Not Mean Dull

None of this is an argument for playing it safe. A room that will not date is not the same as a boring one, and a nursery is a wonderful place to be a little bold. Fungi Folklore in Willow, from Graham & Brown's Solstice, draws a whole woodland floor of mushrooms and ferns in a single green, and Lucy in Sky Blue, from Sandberg's Kolonin II, does the gentlest possible version of the same idea. Havet brings the sea into it, and the whales and sea creatures of Sally make a magical room without a cartoon in sight. The trick is that the drama comes from a genuinely good design rather than from a fleeting theme.

Fungi Folklore in Willow from Solstice by Graham and Brown, a green line drawing of mushrooms and ferns in a child's room with a window and a play table

Fungi Folklore, Willow by Graham & Brown

Lucy in Sky Blue from Kolonin II by Sandberg, a fine sweet pea trail in pale blue and green in a room with an open doorway and a paper lantern

Lucy, Sky Blue by Sandberg

Havet Multi coloured from Resan by Galerie, a soft sea and leaf print in a nursery with a white cot, a muslin canopy and a changing table

Havet, Multi-coloured by Galerie

Beige Sally from Familjen by Sandberg, a painted whale and sea creature mural above a low sofa with a sheepskin stool and toys on the floor

Sally, Beige by Sandberg

Coordonné's Bb Kids is the whole argument in one collection, drawn with real charm and no condescension: the bold flowers of Lush in Peach, the small fawns of Bambis in Mustard, and the tiny scattered motif of Blouse in Peach, which is quiet enough to live with for years.

Lush in Peach from Bb Kids by Coordonne, bold drawn flowers in blue, red and yellow on peach in a child's room with a deep red door

Lush, Peach by Coordonné

Bambis in Mustard from Bb Kids by Coordonne, small fawns and wild flowers on mustard in a nursery with a cot and a scalloped lampshade

Bambis, Mustard by Coordonné

Blouse in Peach from Bb Kids by Coordonne, a tiny scattered motif on pale peach in a child's room with a dress on a hook and a toy basket

Blouse, Peach by Coordonné

A few practical notes make it work in a real family home. Look for durable, wipeable or washable papers that stand up to sticky fingers, and for the water-based, low-odour inks most modern wallpapers use. A single feature wall behind the cot is often all you need, though the ceiling deserves real thought here, since it is the one surface a baby spends hours gazing up at. Browse the children's murals if you want the whole wall, and order a sample to live with for a few days, by daylight and by the glow of the night light, before you commit.

Decorate a nursery for the long haul and you spare yourself the cost and upheaval of redoing it in three years. Better still, you give your child a room with real soul: calm, characterful and entirely their own, whoever they turn out to be.

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