The children’s room
A bedroom that is also a workroom and a playroom, for someone still changing. The tradition applies its bedroom rules with two changes of emphasis; the sleep science applies with more force than anywhere else in the house, and gives the hours by age; the bunk bed, the shared room, the desk that should not face the bed, the room that has to change three times in fifteen years, and the floor that is where a child actually lives.
Oriented E 090°
Wood
A child’s room has to be three rooms, a bedroom, a study and a playroom, and the tradition’s advice for it is mostly about keeping the three from dissolving into one another. The bed follows the bedroom rules. The desk follows the office rules. And the floor, which is where a child actually lives, is asked to be left open. What the tradition does not say, and this page adds, is that a child sleeps longer than an adult and is more easily woken, so that the room where the sleep rules matter most is the one usually planned last.
The bed
The plan is the adult bedroom’s plan with the furniture smaller and the floor larger. The bed against the solid wall, with its head away from the window and the door in view; the desk with the wall behind the chair and the window to its side; the shelving on the door wall, where it overhangs nothing; and the middle of the room empty. The ghosted bed under the window is the arrangement most children’s rooms fall into, because the window wall is often the only wall long enough, and it is the one the tradition avoids and the one that keeps the child awake on summer evenings and cold on winter nights.
The desk
The desk follows the home office: the wall behind the chair, the door in view, and light from the side. The tradition adds two things for a child. The desk should not face the bed, which invites the one to become the other and puts the bed in the eye of a child who is meant to be working; and a child’s desk against a window is a desk that looks out of it, which is pleasant for the child and unhelpful for the homework. Where the room is small, the desk on the wall beside the door, facing into the room with the window at its side, usually satisfies all of this, and it is where the drawing puts it. Until the age of about seven a desk is a table for drawing and can be anywhere on the floor; the fixed desk arrives with the homework, and its position is worth deciding then rather than inheriting from the drawing table.
The floor
The tradition’s one distinctive demand for a child’s room is open floor. Play happens on it, and a room in which every square metre has a piece of furniture on it is read as a room with no qi moving; the designer would say a room with nowhere to be. Alexander’s patterns for children give them a realm of their own and a floor to spread things on, and note that the spreading is the play. Rugs mark the zone; storage goes up the walls, not across the floor; and the toys go into boxes at the end of the day, which is a rule about the floor and not about tidiness. The clutter guide marks the five places things land; in a child’s room the floor is all five.
Light, dark and noise
A child needs more sleep than an adult and gets it, or fails to, in the same room the adults planned for storage. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s consensus gives the hours: ten to thirteen a day for a child of three to five, nine to twelve for six to twelve, and eight to ten for a teenager, against the seven or more an adult needs. Those hours have to be found in the evening and the morning, which is where the room comes in: a room that is bright at bedtime and dark at waking is a room arranged against the child’s clock.
The room that follows from the numbers is one with curtains or a blind that make it properly dark, a low warm light for the night and for bedtime reading, a bright window in the morning, no screen in the room after the evening, and the bed on the wall away from the street. Where a teenager’s clock has drifted late, which it does, the morning window is the one instrument the room has, and the bed with its head away from it and its foot toward it is the arrangement that lets the light do its work without shining on the pillow.
Two children, one room
A shared room is the child’s room twice over, and the tradition’s rules do not change; they have to be satisfied twice. Two beds against the same solid wall, heads together or heads apart, each with the door in view and neither under the window; two desks side by side rather than face to face, as the desk placement guide draws for adults; and one floor between them, kept open, rather than two half-floors divided by a line of toys. Where the room is narrow the manuals prefer beds along the same wall to beds facing each other across the room, which put each child in the other’s line of sight all night, and the research on shared rooms, which finds the noise of one sleeper reaching the other, agrees.
Drawn out, the shared room has two good plans and one bad one. Heads to the same wall with a table between, A, is the simplest and the one most rooms allow, and it gives each child a lamp of their own and a wall at their head. Heads apart in an L, B, gives each child a wall of their own and both the door, and suits a room where the window takes one long wall. Beds end to end along a wall, C, puts one child’s feet toward the door and the other’s head beside it, which fails the rule twice, and is what a narrow room proposes by default.
The room that changes
No other room in the house is replanned as often. The cot stands where a parent can reach it and, the tradition says, where the child can see the door; it is the one bed in the house allowed against a long wall, since the child in it does not climb out. The first bed, at two or three, takes the command position and keeps it. The desk arrives at six or seven and takes the wall beside the door. The teenager wants a door that closes, a room that is dark, and a desk that is a desk, and the tradition’s plan, made at the start, has left room for all of it if the floor was kept open. The mistake is to plan the room for the child of the moment: the wall that the cot does not need is the wall the bed will.
Colour and quiet
The tradition furnishes the room in Wood and Earth: greens, warm neutrals, timber, cotton, and reserves strong Fire, the reds and oranges the shops sell for children, for a single object rather than a wall, on the principle that a child is already the most yang thing in the room. It wants the bed end of the room quieter and darker than the play end, and it wants the screen, when there is one, at the desk rather than the bed and dark at night. None of this is unusual advice. Its virtue is that it comes as a plan rather than a list, which is what a room needs, and a plan can be drawn before the furniture is bought.
Reading the child’s room
The tests, in the tradition’s order:
- The bed. Head to a solid wall, door in view from the pillow, out of its line, and away from the window and the street.
- Overhead. Nothing on the wall above the bed; shelves anchored, on the door wall.
- The desk. Wall behind the chair, window at the side, not facing the bed.
- The floor. Open in the middle, a rug for the play, storage up the walls.
- Dark. Curtains or a blind that close properly; a low warm light for the night.
- Morning. The window unobstructed in the morning, and the bed placed so that the light reaches the room before the pillow.
- Quiet. The bed on the wall away from the road and the living room.
- The screen. At the desk, not the bed, and off after the evening.
- Two children. Same wall or an L; side-by-side desks; one floor.
- The next room. A wall left free for the bed the cot will become.