Inside my head there are thousands of nurseries. Some, I have designed and built — these are rooms that exist in beautiful homes around the world, that real children have grown up in. Some never left the concept stage: sketches on paper, fabric swatches that didn't quite speak to each other, ideas that came close but not close enough. And then there are the ones that began as a feeling. A client sitting across from me in our Chelsea boutique, trying to describe something they could sense but not yet say. Those are the ones that have always stayed with me. Because that feeling — that half-formed, not-quite-articulatable sense of what you want your child's world to be — is where every nursery actually begins, long before anything is chosen or ordered or delivered. It begins with a feeling. And for over twenty years, my job has been to help families find the words for it.
Perhaps the most common experience of a first-time parent sitting across from me would be that they knew what they didn't want far more clearly than they knew what they did. They didn't want something generic. They didn't want to end up with a nursery that looked like every other room on Pinterest. They wanted something that felt like them, something that reflected the rest of their home, their taste, the life they'd built together. But they couldn't yet explain what that actually looked like. That gap between what they felt and what they could express was where the design process either flourished or stalled.
Over the years I developed ways of bridging that gap. Questions I'd ask. References I'd pull. Gentle ways of narrowing the field until a client's face changed — until they said, ‘Yes, that's it, that's exactly it!’ But those questions lived in my head. In my experience. They weren't written down anywhere. And as The Baby Cot Shop grew, I realised that the quality of a client's nursery depended too heavily on how quickly we could get to that moment of clarity and how reliably we could capture it.
So I decided to build something.
How the Nursery Edit was Born
The original version of The Nursery Edit was not a client-facing tool. It was an internal brief, a structured way for our team to capture the right information from a new client before a single design decision was made. What's the architecture of the home? What's the design language running through the rest of the property? Is this a first baby, or a growing family? Does the client lean towards warm or cool tones, pattern or plain, a statement piece or quiet elegance?
It sounds simple. And yet getting those answers in the right order, in the right way, made an enormous difference to the work we produced. Rooms felt more cohesive. Clients felt more confident. The whole process felt less like guesswork and more like a conversation that had been building for years. Then something unexpected happened.
We started sharing an early version of the questionnaire with clients before their first appointment. Just to give them a starting point. Something to sit with. What they told us changed everything. They didn't just find it useful as preparation. They found it revelatory. Clients who had spent weeks feeling paralysed by nursery decisions told us that working through the questions had given them a clarity they hadn't expected to find so quickly. It wasn't because the questions were entirely new or complicated, but because no one had ever asked them in quite that way before. One client told me she'd realised halfway through that the nursery she thought she wanted was actually her mother's taste, not hers. Another said it was the first time she'd been able to explain to her husband exactly what she was trying to create, and that they'd ended up completely aligned where they'd been at an impasse for weeks.
That was the moment I understood what we'd actually built. It wasn't a data capture tool. It was a mirror.
What the Nursery Edit Actually Does
The Nursery Edit is a guided design questionnaire. It takes you from a vague sense of what you want to a clear, personalised nursery direction, all before you speak to a designer, step inside a showroom, or make a single purchase.
It works because it asks the right questions in the right order. Not ‘What furniture do you like?’ but ‘How would you like the room to feel?’ Not ‘What's your budget?’ but ‘Which textures appeal to you?’ It works because it provides an anchor and a starting point to getting clarity about the foremost concerns of ‘How do I know my nursery style?’, ‘Where do I start in my nursery design?’ and ‘How do I plan the nursery?’ By the end, you have something tangible. A design direction that is genuinely yours, shaped by your taste, your home, and your vision for your child's first space.
For some clients it confirms what they already sensed. For others it surfaces something they hadn't consciously named. For almost all of them, it makes the design conversation — whether with our team or with any interior designer — significantly more focused and more productive.
Who The Nursery Edit is For
The Nursery Edit is for anyone in the early stages of planning a nursery, whether you're six weeks pregnant and thinking ahead, or thirty-two weeks in and beginning to feel the pressure of decisions you haven't made yet.
It's particularly useful if you:
- Know you want something beautiful but can't yet articulate what that looks like
- Feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices and don't know where to begin
- Want to brief a designer or visit a showroom but don't feel ready
- Have a clear vision in your head but struggle to explain it to a partner or a designer
- Are creating a nursery that needs to feel like a natural extension of the home you've already built
It takes around ten minutes. It costs nothing. And it leaves you with something most parents don't find until much later in the process: a clear sense of direction.
Why This Matters
The nursery is not just another room to decorate. For most families, it is the most emotionally significant space they will ever create, and often the first time they have thought seriously about what they want their child's world to feel like. That deserves more than a scroll through Instagram and a basket full of things that seemed nice at the time. It deserves intention and clarity. It deserves bespoke nursery design that will still feel right in five years, one that grows with your child, and reflects who you are as a family.
The Nursery Edit won't design your nursery for you. But it will give you the clearest possible starting point — and in my experience, that's the thing most families are missing. Take yours here.