For kids rooms

Designer Dan Vickery, Portland shares his favourite tips for designing and organising a playful, creative kid's room

• To help your kids stay organised, keep things at their height. Closet storage, benches and coat racks will all be used more often if kids can get to them easily.
• Try creating a continuous art center by using wainscoting in a room and painting the wall below with chalkboard paint. You can get chalkboard paint in the color of your choice. Simply paint up to a chair rail or install your own and paint below.
• Most craft and hobby stores sell an additive to paint that allows it to glow in the dark. Try painting stars and a moon on your child's ceiling or a cityscape around the edge of the room. This will get them excited about turning out the lights at night.
• Removable wall transfers are becoming increasingly affordable and the range of patterns and styles grows every day. Call them temporary wall tattoos and let your kid have fun decorating their room in a way you know you won't have to fix later.
• Kids are collectors, so make collecting easy. Pictures and postcards don't always have to be stuck to a corkboard. Try hanging them from strings in front of a window or clipping them to a string along the wall to create an interactive border in a room.
• All kids want display space. Galvanized metal is fairly inexpensive and can be purchased in sheets at most home improvement stores. Just mount on the wall and you have an instant magnetic board.
• Check your local art and crafts store for peel-and-stick cork. You can cut out any shape, simply peel off the backing and attach to any wall for fun pin-up space.
• Rather than a traditional growth chart put a border around the room. Each month you can use non-toxic, water-based paint to put the child's handprint in the border. Watch them grow together.
• Be sure to include multiple kinds of lighting in a kid's room. Overall lighting is a necessity but so is a reading light. It may even help them find the bathroom in the middle of the night.
• If you are painting a dresser or other furniture you know the child will grow out of be sure to let them help. The child could also put their signature on it with personal handprints or fingerprints for a polka-dot design.

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