A nursery is the first room you ever design for someone else. Design Kids is a guide to getting it right: furniture that’s safe and built to last, layouts that work at 3am, and a look you’ll still like when the cot becomes a bed.
Start here
Choosing a cot
What the Australian safety standard actually requires, why mattress fit matters more than the frame, and how to think about cots that convert to toddler beds.
Planning the room
The three zones every nursery needs, where to put the change table so you’re not walking laps at night, and how to make a small room feel calm rather than crowded.
Buying well
Where the money is worth spending, where it isn’t, and how to tell solid timber and real craftsmanship from a nice photo.
Our approach
Most nursery advice is either a product catalogue in disguise or a list of things to be frightened of. We try to do something different. We care about design, the kind that comes from good proportions, honest materials and furniture that does its job without shouting, and we care about safety, because a cot is the one piece of furniture in the house where the standard genuinely matters. Those two things aren’t in tension. The best-designed nursery furniture is usually the safest, because the same discipline produces both.
Everything here is written for Australian homes: our standards, our climate, our tendency to have the nursery in the smallest bedroom in the house. Where we mention specific brands or retailers it’s because we think they’re worth knowing about, not because anyone paid for the mention.
Useful links
A short list of places we send people when they ask. We add to it as we find things worth recommending.
- Our nursery planning guide, which walks through the room from cot to curtains.
- The about page, if you’d like to know who’s writing this and how to get in touch.
- It’s coming into that time of year! Visit our friends at Unreal Christmas Trees for Christmas Tree Hire in Melbourne.
- All the Design Kids retail stores have engineered timber flooring thanks to our friends at Wooden Floors Melbourne.