How to design a bedroom for a teenager

If you’re a parent of a teenager, you’ll know how precious their bedroom is. It’s their private space, and a place for retreating from their peers, their parents and their siblings. So, it’s a room with lots of significance and needs careful designing as a result.

But where do you start when it comes to designing a room for a teenager? Well, here are a few steps to follow.

Think about their age

Are you designing a room for a child that’s just turned thirteen, or is your teen soon heading off to college and university? The way you decorate will vary dramatically depending on this fact, and while it sounds like only a few short years between the two, they’ll do a lot of growing up in that time!

Rooms for young teens shouldn’t be too grown up or too adult. Instead, it should be a space that’s colourful and bright with the possibility to change it in small ways. So, stick to a neutral colour palette for the walls but add pops of colour in the bedding, curtains and rugs. As your teen grows older, they can swap these things for more ‘sophisticated’ colours and textures without it requiring a major overhaul.

However, an older teen may want their room to be a little more grown-up. Let their taste shine through in their bedroom, giving them freedom to choose colours, textures and artwork. Your older teen is probably going to spend lots of time in their bedroom, and their friends are likely to hang out in there too, so try to relax about posters on the wall, cork boards pinned with photos and a ‘floordrobe’ of clothes strewn across the carpet. It might not be to your taste, but it’s generally how teens like their bedrooms! (Though, perhaps you should intervene before their room becomes as messy as this).

Buy them a decent bed

Your teenager is likely to spend an awful lot of time in their bed. In fact, teens need more sleep than their parents and should spend at least nine to eleven hours a night sleeping. It’s important they sleep well for their mood, behaviour and academic performance, and is all the more important when your teen starts learning to drive: you don’t want a sleepy learner driver behind the wheel.

So, buy them a decent bed from somewhere like Divan Beds Centre. Divan mattresses are used in hotels up and down the country, so you’ll know it’s good quality. And, as a bonus, you can order one with storage under the bed – an important requirement when designing a room for teens as it’ll provide them with extra space for their clothes, books and clutter!

Accept technology is just part and parcel of 21^st century teenage-hood

When you were a teenager, you probably didn’t give any thought to technology in your bedroom. But, times have changed, and it’s strange for a teen not to have a TV in their bedroom. Incorporate the TV into the bedroom design by fixing it to the wall if they want to make a feature of it, or nestle it into a wall of shelves if they want it to blend in. Also, give some thought to where the plug points are in the room. A socket by their bedside is useful for charging their phones overnight, but if you want them to actually get to sleep and not spend too much time on a screen, you might be better off designing their room so the socket is a little way away from their bed… meaning they won’t be able to scroll through Facebook all night long.

Hang a mirror on the wall

Teens are known for agonising over their appearance, and whether you’re living with a teenage son or daughter, they’re going to care about how they look. Hang a full length mirror on the bedroom wall if they want one (after all, they’ll only traipse into your bedroom to use yours otherwise), and think about putting the mirror near a plug socket if you can; being able to plug in a set of hair straighteners near to a mirror is a teenage must-have!

Do you have any tips for designing a teenager’s bedroom? Any do’s or don’ts?

* This is a collaborative post *