Creative home ideas for kids

As I’ve divulged many times before here, I’m very keen to have creative kids and I think it’s extremely important for parents to nurture their kid’s creativity as they grow up. For me, the home should be somewhere where kids can experiment and unleash their creative tendencies without having to worry what effect it will have on the family home.

Obviously there have to be limits and this creativity has to emerge in a controlled manner…we can’t have kids taking biros and scribbling all over the walls or painting the carpets now can we? But there are many ways in which parents can design their homes in order to accommodate this creativity in a positive way. And here are just a few of my favourites.

Ideapaint (pictured above) is a great idea for growing kids as they can draw on the walls until their hearts are content and at the end of the day the wall can be wiped down again ready for the next masterpiece. This would obviously be great for a playroom or nursery but I think it would be most useful somewhere like the kitchen where parents tend to be very busy but still need to keep an eye on the kids. You could sit them down and let them get arty while you get on with making dinner.

Having a wall painted with blackboard paint would serve the same purpose and I love th effect that it creates in the kitchen of this Barcelona apartment featured on Digs Digs. Something so simple could provide hours of family fun.

For other rooms in the house a great idea is using colour in wallpaper like this brilliant paper by designer Jon Burgerman. His paper features loads of intricate doodles of weird and wonderful little characters that can be lovingly coloured in by artistic children. This wallpaper would probably be best for older kids though who are capable of colouring inside the lines, purely because the design is quite complex.

This wallpaper by Mini Moderns however would be suitable for kids of any age as the pictures are far simpler. It would also be great for instilling an early love of chair design into any budding little design aficionados. Afterall it’s important that they appreciate the finer things in life isn’t it?

Wallpaper Games by 5.5 Designers is another of my favourites and this one can be enjoyed by adults and kids alike. Ideal for use in the bathroom, the hallway, the kitchen or indeed a child’s playroom, this paper could provide hours of entertainment while kids seek out the hidden words or try to navigate themselves around the labyrinth.

I also love this magnetic wallpaper by MagScapes. The idea of magnetic wallpaper was first conceived by Patricia Adler in 1999. As an established product designer, Patricia says, “The inspiration came when trying to find a way to use walls as a canvas for creative expression. I found that using magnets was simple, clean, endlessly rearrangeable and most of all, fun!”

Patricia and co-founder, Jeremy Lee decided upon the name MagScapes to encourage people to create their own magnetic landscapes. Even babies and toddlers can enjoy this one.

And finally, another of my favourites is this Frame Wallpaper by Graham & Brown. With this paper, every single drawing your kid does can be classed as a masterpiece that deserves to be framed and proudly hung on the wall. No more tatty bits of paper held on the fridge with magnets.

For me, this would make a great feature wall in the dining room and would give visiting dinner guests plenty to look at and talk about. And the kids would feel like they have their own private art gallery. They could even charge admission fees to earn some extra pocket-money!

If you enjoyed this post you may enjoy reading one I wrote on furniture designed specifically for children.

This blog post is part of the mydeco.com ‘Pass It On Kids Room series’, a collaborative blogging project and I’m passing it on to Mary Middleton and Karen Haller