Reader Room

A safari nursery for Alfred that is full of animals and spots.

Natasha Turley is a mum with a vision, great sense of humour

and has found the solution to all our sock monster nightmares.

Here is Alfred’s safari nursery!  There were two things I knew I wanted to include when I set about planning his room. The first was a spotty wall and the second was a little bit of Africa (I will explain why later…) I think children’s rooms give you an opportunity to ‘go wild’ and have some fun with decorating and that’s exactly what I did!

My first job was to tackle the spotty wall. I used a stencil and painted every last spot when I was about 8.5 months pregnant, I have since discovered you can buy spotty wallpaper which would have been much easier! As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to display prints of African animals on the wall but I didn’t want generic images, I wanted something that meant something to me.

I chose to frame some black and white photographs taken by my brother, Sam.  He is an amazing photographer and he now lives in Zimbabwe so we don’t get to see him anywhere near as much as we’d like. We chose three ‘mum and baby’ photographs and then three of solo animals. As you can see, when Alfred was around 1, his favourite pastime was to pull the bottom three prints off the wall so they’ve been replaced with animal heads for now.

I have tried to stick to the rule of ‘only have art/prints that mean something’ throughout this room and the whole house. The other hugely sentimental piece in Alfred’s safari nursery is the lion tapestry above his changing table. My Bampa (grandad) brought it back from Egypt when he was serving in the army just after WW2 and my Nanna didn’t like it so it’s been in the loft for 60 years… and now it has a home in our safari nursery!

The ‘A’ prints on the wall were both hand drawn by good friends of ours and the other thing to mention is the beautiful felt mobile over the cot. Our friends got it from a tiny shop in Scotland just before Alfred was born and it is just lovely. Again this was handmade with little felt safari animals. I hope this doesn’t sound painfully cheesy but we have made it part of the bedtime routine where we say ‘night night’ to each animal and I think it’s become quite a comforting thing for him as well as teaching him some animal names! Before we had Alfred, I didn’t ever know if a mobile was important or not but we certainly wouldn’t be without ours.

I also need to mention the sock monster. Where do socks disappear to?! I was fed up of having random individual socks hanging around so I asked my mum to make a ‘lost socks’ sign with little pegs and I love that they’ve now got a home until the matching one turns up. She made it out of some old wood and stuck pegs on with superglue- simple as that and truly lifechanging for people like me who struggle when things don’t have a proper home.

Oh, and the giant giraffe… impulse buy…definitely more for me than him.

On the way into the bedroom, there is a little corridor which really felt like wasted space, so we wallpapered it and made a little ‘book nook’ on the way in. The idea was that the banana leaf wallpaper was like ‘entering the jungle’. We put some bookshelves up on the right-hand side but have since learnt that toddlers love climbing, and we essentially installed a climbing frame but never mind.

The books are another part of the bedtime routine, when Alfred walks into his room he picks a book (or 10, or just throws them all on the floor) and then we sit in the chair and have stories. That chair is definitely a nursery essential. We have spent A LOT of time in that chair in the middle of the night and having a comfy one is the most important thing in the world!

The other essential I have found has been the storage baskets. One has been great for hiding the nappy bin and the other one is the place I put his clothes in as and when I find things he has grown out of. This means I can sort as a go rather than having to have a full monthly sort out. When the basket is full I (by I, I mean my husband) put the big bag in the loft.

I hope you have enjoyed Alfred’s safari nursery tour. I think that nurseries/children’s bedrooms are so much fun to decorate. I already want to do it all again! 

Natasha x

We absolutely love Alfred’s safari nursery!  A really well thought out, fun and stylish nursery, what a wonderful place to start life in.  We are particularly impressed with the sock monster veteran sock solution and are a little bit in love with the book nook outside his bedroom door, even if it turn into a climbing wall!

If you want to see more of Natasha’s wonderful décor check her out!

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