The biggest challenge with decorating a child’s room as opposed to an adult’s room is striking the perfect balance between “fun” and “childish”. You want to create a space that inspires creativity and joy for your child without making something that they will outgrow quickly as their interests and hobbies change. It’s also tough to design a child’s room that can fit in with the rest of a very contemporary and maturely designed home. One of the best solutions we’ve discovered to bridge that gap is engraving.
When we first started using the engraving technique, it was actually with a history in mind. We love the concept of hieroglyphics and architectural embellishments. So many different societies have maintained a tradition of personalized home design, from portraits carved into stone by ancient Egyptians, to the engraved titles of the municipal buildings on Wall Street.
There are a couple of different options we offer as far as embellishing your child’s new furniture.
The classic way of personalizing a piece is by adding a name, symbol, or meaningful word into it. We’ve done this for a few clients now, and we always find it to be a touching way to make a child feel special and mark their bed or desk as their own. A simple gesture that reminds them that you designed their room together, to be a place where they can relax, create, share, and grow.
One example of this type of work is the bed we made for Bennett:
A more detailed version of this idea is the one we made for Aram, who wanted a nautical themed bed with flag engravings on the side. Aram loves all things sea-worthy, so we added maritime letters spelling out his name.
The second option is more intricate: etching the piece with a mural. We started incorporating this idea using the artwork of our good friend and amazing artist, Katie Merz. When we met Katie, we knew right away that we would work well together, because we shared a love of expressing ideas and telling stories through the use of both language and images.
We admire her work so much that we made a few of her designs available as options for one of our standard collection pieces: the Graffiti minibunk.
Furniture with Katie’s design, or any design as intricate as this, means not only buying a functional and stylish piece of furniture, but also a new piece of art to center a room around. The style of murals that Katie designs are ideal for kids rooms because they’re eccentric and unconventional, but don’t go off the deep-end into “childish” or “kitschy”.
Another option we offer in the realm of “furniture that seconds as artwork” is our minibunk bridge design, which was inspired by (you guessed it!) our beloved NYC, and it’s many arched bridges.
Both of these engraving styles are made possible by what has quickly become our favorite machine in the workshop: our CNC router. We could go on and on about the mechanics of this machine but we’ll keep it short and sweet for you: a CNC router can take just aboutany digital image and cut a nearly perfect rendering of it into wood, or other materials. Keep this in mind as you start to design your child’s room, as we can usually accommodate any special image, word or symbol in some way as a lasting and unique embellishment.
