New Project: A Small Indoor Playhouse!

This project is in partnership with World Market.

We've taken on a new design project, and it's a fun one! World Market challenged us to makeover a small space, preferably a kids' space, and we found the perfect candidate. In our own homes' design plans this year, we had the idea of transforming a closet space under the stairs into a kids' playhouse--it's still something we'd love to do--but we have so many projects already underway here, that we thought we'd cast a net to see if anyone else in our area had a small space we could tackle. Turns out, friends of ours had already framed out a potential small playroom and they were more than happy to let us swoop in and help them finish it over the next few weeks!

The above photo (from here) is providing a lot of inspiration for the "exterior" of the small 5x9 room, that currently looks like this:

It's in the basement of the home, and they had already framed out two, small, adorable windows in the walls with plans to make it look like a miniature home from the outside. We are excited to add little windows and window boxes, siding and even a roof line! This sweet inspiration photo (from here), with lighter gray siding and a pop of pink interior, is also tugging at my heart strings:

Once we had a clear direction of where we wanted to go on the exterior of the room, I went to work designing the small 5x9 interior. Although a tiny footprint, we really wanted to maximize the space with toy storage, seating, and even a loft space to bring the room vertical a bit. There's currently no lighting in the space, but I tried to capture each side for you to get an idea:

The above picture is where we plan to build a small loft area. Something about climbing (even a few feet off the ground) makes kids' so, very happy and it was something our friends requested. I searched for a lot of inspiration photos, before we landed on this one that we'll be customizing for their space.

We'll likely go with a vertical ladder to save on space and the room is not nearly this tall, but the vertical paneling and additional window is definitely where we're headed. Plus! I love the bonus floor space a loft leaves underneath for a chalkboard or toy storage.

On the other side of the space, we really knew some sort of seating for reading, lounging or for parents to come "visit" would be nice. World Market has a large selection of small space furniture and we found the perfect, less than 5' wide sofa in the funnest peacock blue color--plus, it's on super sale!

The sofa became the jumping point for the rest of the budget-friendly decor for the room, I rounded up below:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

Since the floor space is minimal, we'll be utilizing the walls to bring in lots of storage and spunk. I love these wall-mounted baskets (no. 10) that we plan on mounting and filling up with lots of little toy collections. And an overflow tassel basket on the floor (no. 12) for larger things. For art, we're bringing in these fun animal busts (on sale!), the framed giraffe print, a toy guitar we'll hang (but will absolutely be played as well) and a chalkboard that they can draw on. This removable wallpaper will be the backdrop of the tiny space. And we can't wait to layer these small Chindi Area Rugs (no. 11 only $19!) to soften things up. I also ordered a bunch of World Market's faux succulents to fill in the window boxes.

Pretty sweet, right? There are so many great examples of indoor playhouses (I gathered a few more favorites here) and I love that they can be carved out of even the smallest rooms. We're shooting for a full reveal in just a few weeks so I'm sure we'll be sharing a lot more over on our Instagram stories until then.