Feng Shui Tips: How to Decorate a Child's Bedroom

Simon Brown's helpful book Essential Feng Shui: Your Practical Guide to Health, Wealth and Happiness is loaded with concise tips that are easy to grasp and commonsensical (and I say that in the most complimentary way - it's rubbish to plow through a feng shui book that hits you with double-barreled mysticism when you're looking for practical decorating advice). Here are a few of Brown's tips on decorating a child's bedroom. 

• If more than one child sleeps in the same bedroom, bunk beds will save space and the kids will both be facing the same direction when they sleep. This will help prevent arguments between them.
• Beds should be cozy, so use plump pillows and fluffy duvets and comforters. Keep your bedding fabrics 
• Avoid lamps (trailing cords aren't ideal around young childen anyway). Wall lights are great, and uplights that reflect off the ceiling support growth energy.
• Natural wood is good flooring material and it's easy to clean.
• Fabric window blinds make ideal window treatments. They don't block chi energy flow and when they're rolled up, they maximize the room to full chi exposure.
• Don't hang mobiles directly over a child's bed, but mobiles can be either rousing or relaxing additions to a child's bedroom (metal: rousing; soft fabric in light colors: relaxing).
• Select fabric wall hangings for the walls whenever possible, and choose positive images. Select either bright colors (stimulating) or soft colors (soothing), depending on the child's temperament.
• Select furniture with rounded edges (stools, tables, chairs). A good location for a play table is in the east side of the room, facing east (good active energy there).
• There are a variety of feng shui appropriate wall and accent colors for a child's bedroom. Softer shades will induce calm while brighter colors are more stimulating. Plain walls and bed covers reduce the impression of clutter. A soft blue is a good color to use, bright green and yellows (in small accent doses) provide stimulation without breaking the room's sense of harmony, yellow is a great color to use in any part of a child's bedroom, and star motifs introduce fire energy (good). Soft pastels and pale purple inject more calm into the room.
• Avoid: open doors and open curtains at night; placing the heads of beds below windows; clutter; electrical equipment like TVs or computers; big, bulky furniture (kids need lots of open space). 

Bonus

Click here to read 6 Feng Shui Tips to Make Your Bedroom Better.

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11 Best Beds - Modern Design, Bedroom Elegance

If you're an interior designer, one of the challenges you face is helping your client "move on." And moving on can take on several forms: move on from the furnishings you had in your college dorm room (no, it's not okay to use old orange crates and stacks of bricks for bookshelves), move on past the hideous furniture you inherited when Aunt Opal passed away last year (sometimes furniture should be buried with their owners), or move on beyond bad taste to good taste ("But it was on sale!" is not a good reason to keep anything revolting).

Sometimes replacing one key piece of furniture in a room is enough to tip the decorating scheme from dreadful to daring ... and I've selected 11 beds (actually 10 beds and 1 headboard) that could turn an ugly bedroom into a showplace, or at least inspire the rest of the room to shape up and match the new bed's high standards. The photo above and the next two photos feature beds from the hipsters at Atelier Interior Design - the Nuba bed (top), Giorgia bed (top, below), and Bridge bed (bottom, below) are all beds that could drastically change the temperature and style quotient of any bedroom. 

I love how the Atelier beds would look great floating in a room. Bed design trends are moving away from the flat-against-the-wall restrictions of beds of yore; a floating position allows the Bridge bed's split headboard to adjust to different levels of recline to accommodate different reading, sleeping, or TV-watching postures. Very smart. 

And consider the Antalya Queen bed from McGuire Furniture (above). Its rattan woven frame is covered in laced rawhide for a strong statement not often made in bedrooms. This would be a great choice for both contemporary and traditional bedrooms. Likewise, the Bill Sofield Queen Branche bed (below) packs a similar visual wallop with its daring woven headboard and fretwork legs. 

Click to read more ...