Choosing kids' bedroom wallpaper is really two questions: what it's made of, and whether they'll still like it in three years. Here's how we'd answer both.
Most people choosing kids' bedroom wallpaper start with colour, and colour is the easy part. The two questions that actually matter get asked much later, usually by the person doing the installing: what is this made of, and will the child still like it in three years?
Both are answerable. Neither is answerable from a photograph, which is why so much of this decision happens on a phone screen and then gets regretted.
The part you can't see in the picture
A wall in a child's bedroom is a large, close, permanent surface in a room where somebody sleeps for ten hours a night with the door shut. That is a reasonable thing to be fussy about.
The fussiness should be aimed at the material rather than the design. Of the eight finishes we print murals on, the one we'd choose for a nursery is the fabric-backed wallcovering: it's made without phthalates, heavy metals, formaldehyde or phenol, and carries low-emission certification. It's also soft to the touch and forgiving about the small imperfections every plastered Bangkok wall has.
That's a claim about that specific material, not a blanket one about wallpaper. If a supplier tells you the whole catalogue is safe for nurseries without naming a substrate or a certification, that isn't an answer.
Drawn, not generated
There's a second thing worth knowing, and it shows up in how a wall reads at close range.
Our Kikki Belle collection comes from a studio that builds each design as a composition first, then has a team of illustrators hand-paint the individual elements — a particular animal in a particular pose, a tree, a sky. An average design runs to more than a hundred separate items and layers, and can take months to finish.
This matters more in a child's room than anywhere else in a house, because a child looks at their wall from about thirty centimetres away, lying down, for years. Work that was assembled quickly tends to show it at that distance. Work that was drawn holds up.
The three-year question
A room decorated for a toddler can embarrass a seven-year-old. The usual fix is to choose something blander, which is a shame and doesn't really work either — bland dates just as fast, it simply dates quietly.
What ages well is a scene rather than a character. A forest, a coastline, a canopy of leaves: none of those belong to a particular age. A cartoon does. The Kikki Belle designs are almost all landscapes with animals in them, which is why they tend to survive the birthday that retires everything else in the room.
Colour helps too. Most of the range comes in several colourways, and the muted versions — a forest printed in one soft, misty tone, a beige ground instead of a bright one — carry a child from four to twelve without anybody having to admit the wall was a phase.
Where it usually goes wrong
Three things, in order of how often we see them.
The busy wall ends up opposite the bed. A detailed scene is wonderful behind a headboard and difficult to fall asleep facing. Same design, wrong wall.
The pattern is chosen at thumbnail size. A design that charms at 400 pixels can be overwhelming at two and a half metres. Ask to see it at your actual wall dimensions before you commit — we'll mock it up for you.
Nobody measured the wall properly. Very few walls are square. We print to your measurements rather than to fixed panel sizes, which removes the problem entirely, but only if the measurements are right. Our installation team does this as a matter of course; if you're fitting it yourself, measure the width and height in three places each and use the largest.
What we'd actually put up
If it were our own child's room: Secret Sealife behind the bed for a room that needs calming down, Playful Forest for a small room that needs light, and Monochrome Forest in the vintage blue for a child who already has a great deal going on and doesn't need the walls joining in.
Murals are priced per square metre from ฿750, printed to your wall rather than to a standard size, and every one of them can be seen at your dimensions before you decide anything.
If you're leaning towards a picture wall, our guide to ordering a custom wall mural walks through the steps, tropical and botanical murals make famously good children's rooms, and we've answered the mould question properly in what Bangkok's humidity actually does to wallpaper.
Come and look properly
Send us a photo of the room and the two measurements, and we'll show you what a few of these would actually look like on that wall — in English or Thai, whichever is easier. You can also browse the full range on our murals page, or bring us something entirely your own and we'll print that instead.
