Before moving into my house, I knew nothing about baby-proofing, or even children, for that matter. I didn’t know if I would have any, so my husband and I happily acquired a two-bedroom folly, complete with a pond and a large amount of poisonous yew hedging. It was heart-rendingly beautiful and wildly impractical.
As it transpired, I was almost three months pregnant by the time we eventually moved in and I tried, very hard, to ignore everyone’s observations, which was that we had bought a house which was fundamentally incompatible with having children. On our first day, while waiting for the estate agent to show up with the keys, our dog fell into the pond. As we fished him out, dripping wet and festooned in slimy green algae, I wondered how we were going to cope if we had a baby.
Instead, I focused on the more immediate task of redecorating the house. Bit by bit, it gradually lost the feeling of belonging to someone else. Walls were painted, furniture acquired, and rooms repurposed and reimagined. The baby was born, and to my surprise, he slotted into our home with ease. For the first few months he slept in our room and lay, obligingly, wherever he was put down. I began to wonder if baby-proofing was simply another one of those lies you’re sold as a parent, in order to frighten you into buying yet more things that you simply don’t need.
There were plenty of examples of people living in stylish homes who also happened to have young children, many of whom had been featured in the pages of House & Garden. Flora Soames lived in a charming stone cottage, packed with antiques and beautiful fabrics, that seemed to have effortlessly embraced the arrival of her daughter. Then there was Pandora Sykes’ London home, which she’d impressively decorated in a matter of weeks before her first child was born, and was a riot of colour and vintage finds. Skye McAlpine had a pair of heavenly homes in London and Venice, with exquisite textiles and plenty of china on display, despite the fact that she had two sons.
It was all perfectly manageable, I told myself, as I wallpapered the bedrooms, and painted walls in soft hues of chalky emulsion, and bought yet another rickety antique cabinet from eBay. This honeymoon period lasted for almost a year – long enough for me to fill the vast tracts of open shelving that were present in all of the principal rooms – and then the baby learnt how to crawl, and then to walk, and suddenly, everything changed.
All the issues that we’d been warned about became painfully apparent, along with an entire host of secondary problems that I’d inadvertently created myself. I suddenly realised that there were two strands to baby-proofing – making your house safe for a young child, but also decorating in a way that was durable enough to allow your home to weather the equivalent of a small tornado.
However, by this point, I was about to have a second child, so there was no going back – I simply had to live with the decisions I’d made. Ultimately, I’m glad I didn’t allow the prospect of starting a family to affect my choice of home, but here are some of the things that I’d wish I’d known about living with toddlers and young children, before I’d started redecorating.
Wallpaper with caution
High-traffic areas and wallpaper don’t mix particularly well, as the colour consultant and designer Emma Diaz discovered. ‘I was desperate to include a beautiful wallpaper by Tess Newall when she launched it a few years ago – and it is still one of my favourite spaces here in the cottage,’ she says. ‘The best place that I could find for it was up the stairs. This looks incredibly pretty, but is the most impractical decision I have made in the cottage where our son is involved. Mucky fingers after dinner and garden playtimes mean that there are now countless marks from my son climbing up the stairs towards the bathroom – so I definitely wouldn’t be wallpapering from floor to ceiling with a child in the house again!’
Limit open shelving
Initially, I was thrilled that my house had plenty of custom-built joinery. There were bookcases everywhere – and I loved books! Fast forward several years, and there is a rising tide of empty bottom shelves, as I keep moving my beloved library out of the growing reach of babies, who like nothing better than to enthusiastically unpack things. I now understand why so many bookcases have cupboards at the bottom of them.
Consider kitchen cabinetry
On a similar note, it’s now very fashionable to eschew high-level kitchen cupboards in favour of open shelves, giving a more spacious and less ‘fitted’ feel. However, one or two above-counter cabinets would certainly come in useful if you have small children, providing much-needed storage for kitchen items that are too ugly to have out on display. You might think that the solution is simply to put child locks on the lower-level units, but that isn’t ideal either, as you will inevitably spend vast amounts of time attempting to open them. So much time, in fact, that your toddler also learns how to open the safety locks, thus defeating the entire purpose of them.
Keep rooms clear
‘The temptation when you are taking on a renovation or decorating project is to fill the space,’ says Victoria Gray of Olivine Design. ‘In fact, clear floor space is what you will want most.’ In her own home, Victoria ended up removing a desk from her open-plan kitchen when her two children were small in order to free up more room for them to play. ‘It is also so important to remember that you can’t decorate for just one age as they grow up quickly and will need different requirements from the rooms,’ she continues. ‘Our advice would be to create interiors that can be added to without having to change everything, for example choose colours that will grow with your children and fabrics that suit different ages.’
Beware the 5-amp light fitting
Beloved by interior designers, these are the plug sockets you need if you want to turn on all your table and floor lamps with a single switch. Unlike the oblong-shape holes of a conventional UK plug socket – which also have an inbuilt safety feature making accidents unlikely – the live wire of a five-amp plug is accessed via a tempting round hole that’s the exact size of a toddler’s finger. It’s also impossible to buy covers for 5-amp plugs, as I’ve recently discovered.
Choose patterned fabrics and wipeable paint finishes
A pattern can hide a multitude of sins, and is a smart choice for upholstery that will take a battering. It might even be possible to use a high-quality outdoor fabric in high-traffic areas – Flora Soames does an excellent striped fabric that ‘passes the tomato ketchup test,’ as she puts it. For the walls, consider wipeable finishes – if you prefer the matt look, then consider a paint like Farrow & Ball’s Dead Flat, so you can remove the inevitable greasy finger-prints.
Don’t compromise
‘You don’t want to sacrifice too much on the aesthetic front for children who are ultimately, one hopes, going to grow out of drawing on the walls,’ says Flora Soames. ‘When you decorate a house, you want it to last, and you do come out the other side.’ It is true, of course, that while a small degree of baby-proofing is desirable from a safety perspective, it would be dreary to bend too much to practicality. I have to remind myself that things can be repaired, walls repainted, wallpaper patched. Perhaps, in years to come, the knocks and marks might even be more precious, a reminder of times past, and another strand to add to the tapestry of a family home.
