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WHETHER LITTLE OR LARGE, THE RIGHT PLAY AREA WILL KEEP EVERYONE IN THE FAMILY HAPPY
FEATURE Hugh Metcalf
Decorating a playroom doesn’t sound like serious business, does it? It’s a room that, in theory, you can go all-out with, making it as riotous, colourful and creative as you (or your kids) desire. But that all hangs on the presumed notion that a playroom is something to be hidden away behind closed doors – aseparate space that children are sent to play in that contains the mess and anything that’s going to be particularly jarring with your home’s ‘grown-up’ decor.
However, enter into a conversation with any interior designer and you’re likely to quickly discover this set-up is actually less than ideal, for both adults and kids alike. ‘The biggest mistake that people make when designing a children’s play space is thinking that they can create a place where children and their toys can be squirrelled away,’ says interior designer Sophie Chapman, an associate at The Vawdrey House. ‘The reality is that children wish to be with their adults in the thick of it, socialising and being seen and heard.’ For adults, too, it can be a ‘freeing ’ position for a play area. Playtime supervision becomes something that can be done alongside other tasks and chores.
But how do you feel about including a play area in the main part of your home? If you’re worried about a playroom taking over the adult spaces, you might find that it actually helps to keep things properly organised. ‘A separate play space away from the heart of the home inevitably means that toys find their way into the key rooms like the kitchen and then have no place to live, so inevitably create more clutter and disarray,’ Sophie says.
The question then becomes about how to create a play space that lives up to the rest of your home. ‘Play spaces don’t need to be bright and gaudy, full of primary colours for young curious minds to be active and engaged,’ says Reuben Ward, lead designer at Blakes London. At a recent project, Blakes London designed a play space that shared a large open-plan room with an adults’ cinema and lounge area, which serves as a perfect example. ‘By using natural timbers and rich blues we were able to use the same tones and materials in both spaces to create harmony, while still enabling a strong demarcation between the spaces,’ explains Reuben.
This divide is, however, more than just implied: the project uses a room divider to help give this room the flexibility to flit between the adult and child-friendly spaces. ‘A thick curtain separated the two rooms so that by day, when both adults and children were using the space, the room seemed to be as one – but at night, when the children had gone to bed, the paren
