Our youngest of generations in our households can certainly be the pickiest, but it’s generally for good reason (and hopefully with positive intent). Their brains are just beginning to form, they’re learning how to handle their feelings, and if you larger families or households, they’re most likely aiming to determine how to navigate relationships with those around them.
It’s a common misconception that the Australian Heritage Homes team is only known because we construct beautiful and unique homes that meet your needs. Fact: but our expertise, given all the homes that we’ve worked on in our decades of experience, translates into an abundance of nuggets of advice inside your home and in your garden as well. We like to have initial conversations with prospective customers about their needs for the home and support accordingly. And we always ask if children are in the picture. Whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, here are some of the nuggets that we just alluded to:
- Let’s start with their bedroom(s) and natural light. If we can determine a way to angle their rooms (and all, if possible) towards natural light, you’ll see a plethora of benefits. Waking up will be easier and natural light has a lot of positive health benefits – including better moods and more drive to complete the activities of the day.
- Design them so that they’ll be able to grow with the rooms, e.g., not building a small closet and expecting a teenager to live in it down the road. Renovations are always possible, but it’s even better to get well ahead of them.
- Think through if you want your children on the same floor as you or not. There are pros and cons to both – especially if you’re dealing with very young children that you’ll need to check on, on a regular basis, as well as teenagers, who may try and pull a fast one on you.
- Now, aside from bedrooms, it’s one of our favourite parts of the design process to chat about other multi-purpose spaces. We say ‘multi-purpose’ intentionally because you’ll want to think through the different activities they’ll be pursuing there. There’s a large scale of options – you might want to add a purposeful nook to the kitchen where they’ll be able to study under your watchful eye. You may want to put in another social space entirely, where they can watch television or listen to music with friends, and you won’t have to deal with noise or mess.
- The requirements for additional spaces are totally different. If it’s a room with a television, you probably don’t want a lot of natural light, but rather a more comfortable feel. We’d say that the opposite is true for anything related to studying.
Planning is the underlying theme here. Think through the above if a move or build is on the radar and reach out with any questions.