House Tour | Our Scandinavian-inspired neutral nursery

It’s been a long (loooong) road to get here, but last week we finally put the finishing touches to our baby boy’s nursery, and here it is!

Neutral nursery details: cot / changing table / toy box / sofa / rug

Our aim here was to create a reasonably neutral nursery (We know we’re having a boy, but we’re not really into gender-specific colours) in the Scandinavian-inspired style I’m always stalking on Instagram and Pinterest. As anyone who’s visited/seen our house will know, we’re very much into light, bright spaces and neutral colour schemes, and we wanted the nursery to reflect that. We also wanted to create a whimsical look which wasn’t too baby-ish: this is the room he’ll have for as long as we stay in this house, so we went for something that we can adapt easily as he grows. And, of course, once he’s old enough to have his own preferences for decor, it’ll be up to him how he wants it all to look, but for now, we were keen to stick to a neutral nursery, which reflects our own taste, but which will hopefully have enough little details to interest a baby, too.

Here are some of the ways we tried to bring a little bit of Scandinavian-inspired style to our neutral nursery:

01.

Scandi-style furniture

Our starting point for this room was the nursery furniture, which is all from the ‘Sixties’ range c/o Kidsmill. I love the white wood and oak legs (which just so happen to match the legs on our sofa, which was moved down from the bedroom), and I also love the simplicity of the style, which is very much our taste – in fact, if I didn’t need it for the nursery, I’d happily have the changing table/ dresser anywhere else in the house, too. (The nappy disposal unit that’s hiding on the other side of it, meanwhile, maybe not so much…)

All of the furniture has special soft close/open mechanism – so the dresser drawers just push to open, while the lid of the toy box won’t snap shut and trap little fingers. The cot, meanwhile, is designed to be turned into a bed once he’s a little older, like so:

The extra wood panel for the front is currently in the attic, but you basically just take the cot bars off one side and put this on instead. For now, though, it looks like this:

I s(I got the little trousers and top from H&M – SO much cuteness! The little bear on the side, meanwhile, is our Whispbear white noise machine!)

As I mentioned in last week’s pregnancy diary, all of this furniture was assembled on site by our delivery driver, Bart, who had driven all the way from The Netherlands with it (Er, not just for us, I hasten to add: he had other deliveries, too!). We’re both flat out with work right now, so that was a huge help to us – and he even left us a little pair of wooden clogs, too: thanks, Bart!

02.

Light coloured walls

Because we don’t get a lot of natural light here in Scotland, especially in the winter, we’ve gone for light (mostly white) walls throughout our house, in a bid to try to keep it as bright as possible. For the nursery, we’ve gone for the painfully obvious option of keeping three walls white, while the third is the same grey shade we used in the master bedroom: we actually mixed this ourselves for the bedroom wall, using plain white and a random, much darker grey and had enough of it left over to do this wall in the nursery, so that saved us a bit of cash, there.

To make it a little more interesting, we then added the tree decal, which we bought on eBay, plus the ‘Hello’ sign, which we painted gold from the original white:

That gold accent colour is also picked up in the handles of the closet doors (These were originally sliding mirrored doors, but Terry replaced them with wooden ones, and also completely rebuilt the inside of the closet, to maximise the storage!), and these awesome gold stars, which my mum found at a local garden centre:

These were actually being sold as Christmas decorations (Which is why my mum originally bought them), but as soon as we laid eyes on them, we knew they’d look good in this rather bare corner of the room: and they’re much too nice to only been seen at Christmas, anyway!

Speaking of decor:

03.

Bold prints and typography

I’ve already shown you the gallery wall we put together: these prints are all c/o Desenio, and yes, they’re very securely attached to the wall, so the baby can’t kick them down! Although we wanted to create a neutral nursery, we didn’t want it to be totally lacking in personality, and, as most of my regular readers will know by now, I’m a bit of a sucker for a typography-based print, so these were an easy choice for me.

The two animal prints, meanwhile, were Terry’s choice, and, as I mentioned in my previous post on these, we just really liked the idea of the baby being surrounded by a bunch of friendly little animals! Speaking of which…

04.

The Mammoths

I’ve shown you these before, too: basically, a lot of the nurseries I’d pinned on Pinterest had a Scandinavian-style wooden rocking sheep in them. I absolutely loved it, and was going to buy one… until I came across these rocking mammoths, and fell hard for them instead. These were c/o Simply Colours at Not On the High Street, and the the large mammoth is a ride-on rocker, while the smaller one is a pull-along toy. They’re joined by a selection of other animals, including Fin, the Sheep Night Light, and E.T. who turned up unexpectedly last week, having been cunningly snuck into the room by my mum (OR WAS HE? Because, I mean, it COULD be that E.T just arrived all by himself, couldn’t it?):

I was kind of obsessed with E.T. as a child, so this is a nice little nod to my own childhood, as well as being another friendly face for the nursery. “I just love all the little faces,” I said to Terry when we were in here earlier this week, and it’s true: I feel like, everywhere I look, there’s a cute little critter of some kind smiling at me, and I’m all about that, obviously.

(THE FACES! Also, I realise no one will believe me on this, but we actually DIDN’T pick these toys based on the fact that they’d work well with our neutral nursery decor – in fact, three of them were gifts. I’m not going to deny that this small fact makes me happy, though…)

Speaking of E.T., he’s sitting on another one of my favourite things about this room:

05.

Mini Eames Rocking chair

We have quite a few Eames-inspired chairs in our house now (You can see some of them in my kitchen and living room tours), and as soon as I realised you could buy mini versions, I knew we had to get one. We found this one on eBay, and while the baby obviously won’t be using it for quite some time, I loved it too much to resist it!

06.

Chevron rug

A lot of the Scandinavian nurseries I’ve seen have wood floors, rather than carpet: Terry really wanted to follow suit, and have the same/similar white wood we have in the bedroom, but while I love the way it looks, I wanted to stick with the existing carpet: partly because I think it’ll be softer on little knees etc once the baby starts crawling and walking, but also because we have the same carpet throughout this floor of the house (With the exception of the bathroom and my dressing room, which I actually regret now…), and I just prefer it that way, rather than having different floor coverings for each room.

As a compromise, we did get this gorgeous chevron rug c/o Modern Rugs: some of you might recall me talking about it in my pregnancy diary a few weeks ago. Because this is a very neutral nursery, we picked an equally neutral rug, which I think works really well with the rest of the colour scheme, and helps tie everything together. We have three of these rugs now, and I honestly can’t recommend them enough: they’re just so soft!

07.

Wooden ruler and storage box

At the entrance of the room, meanwhile, we have the gold ‘Hello’ sign I mentioned above, underneath which is the little wooden storage bench my parents bought a few weeks ago. I think of this as the ”book bench”, because it’s already filled with books, and with plenty more to come, I’m sure. Like the toy box, this has a soft-close mechanism on the lid to keep it child-friendly, and, when he’s older, it’ll be another place to sit and read, or put his shoes on, or whatever.

Behind the door, we also have a giant wooden ruler from Lovestruck Interiors, I mentioned in last week’s pregnancy diary, and which we think will be a nice way to track his height as he gets bigger.

(Oh, and the dustbin you can see in the first photo is just a laundry bin from IKEA!)

08.

Wooden toys

Finally, just to add a few little finishing touches, we also bought this wooden sheep toy, plus the alphabet blocks you can see dotted around the room. Again, we know the baby won’t be playing with things like this for a while (And yes, we also know he’s going to want a bunch of garish, plastic toys that won’t be remotely in keeping with our neutral nursery decor, and that’s absolutely fine!), so these are really just there to make it look a little less empty, really.

Oh, and just in case you’re curious about what this room looked like before we got to work on it, here it is when we first moved in:

A not-so neutral nursery…

I think I like it better now, all things considered…

I was really keen to get this room finished, just so I could feel a little more organised, but, while we’ll be using the changing table and closet etc, the baby will actually be sleeping in our room for the first few months, so we haven’t bothered to set up the baby monitor etc yet: we also have a couple of other items on the way for it, although nothing essential, so, just in case I didn’t post enough photos for you, here’s a little video Terry made of the finished room:

[Thanks to Kidsmill for collaborating on this post!]