Orange is one of your favorite colors, and you love the sunny energy it puts out. That exciting and happy impression is perfect for a nursery, so you’ve decided to make it your main color when you design your baby’s nursery. The problem is, you can’t figure out how to keep it from being too vibrant and overwhelming, and there are too many ugly orange tones out there. We found some Orange Nursery Ideas to help create a cohesive space.
1) DIY Colorful Bird Mobile
Orange is a brilliant color that can pair with the right neutrals but often looks better with other vibrant colors. If you want to create a colorful orange nursery, you can get decorations in a variety of colors, with orange as the primary color. For example, you can make a bird mobile like this one with a variety of colors, including orange that’ll help it to fit in with the rest of the room. If you have children, you can have them help decorate it as long as there’s some orange to help keep it from clashing.
2) Orange and Turquoise
Orange and blue are opposites on the color wheel, which makes them a striking combination that could make the nursery more intense. Of course, you’ll need to be a bit cautious to ensure that it’s not so intense that your baby can’t sleep. Turquoise is a good blue choice since it’s not as bold when paired with orange, so you might try getting decorations like this ombre curtain that fades from turquoise to orange seamlessly.
3) Landscape
Orange is a bright color and can be too intense if you paint all four walls with it. One way to include it’s to paint a mural, but if you’re not an artist, that might seem impossible or expensive. Instead, you can use these instructions to paint a simple landscape that uses the color orange, creating a beautiful and simple scene that’s more than sufficient for adding some pretty colors to a nursery. If you make a wall like the one in this video, the almost three-dimensional look will be fascinating for your baby.
4) Orange Suns
The sun is generally considered yellow or orange, depending on the image, and most sunsets are orange or pink. Since it’s a sunny and cheerful color, it makes sense to decorate parts of the nursery with orange suns. For example, we found these stickers on Amazon that you can use to make the walls look like they’re polka-dotted with different-sized orange suns. This way, you can include a pattern along with the fun and pretty imagery.
5) Three White Walls and One Blue Wall
Believe it or not, you can have a nursery that’s focused on the color orange even if orange isn’t the most prevalent color in the room. This nursery by Kenyatte from My Design Rules shows how you can start with white walls and a single dark blue accent wall, then add orange touches like pillows and carpet. Despite the large amounts of blue and white, orange is the most intense and noticeable color, creating a vibrant look that complements the other colors in the room.
6) Oranges
Orange is unique in that it’s not just a color but a fruit. Like flowers, fruits have been used as decorations for a long time, and you can use them in your nursery, too. You can put out faux fruit and spray it with an orange scent or just put toys or faux fruit out. If you choose toy fruit, you can let your child play with it when they’re older, too. You can also find decorations and furnishings like this muslin swaddle blanket with pictures of oranges on it.
7) Board and Batten Accent Wall
While orange is a sunny and happy color, it may be a bit too bright to paint each wall with. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a beautiful and happy wall color, though; you just might not want to use it for all four walls. This board and batten-style accent wall is ideal because the texture breaks it up and keeps the brilliant color from becoming blinding without getting rid of the inherent sunny impression. This way, the room feels happy when your baby is playing but doesn’t interfere with their sleep.
8) Fox Lamp
Lamps are a wonderful idea for nurseries because they let you get some extra light near the changing table so that you can see what you’re doing if the overhead lights aren’t enough. They’re also wonderful for when you need to change a diaper or get your baby back to sleep in the middle of the night and don’t want to turn on a glaring overhead light that’ll make it hard to go back to sleep afterward. We found this lamp that has an orange fox at the base, making it perfect for an orange nursery.
9) Chalkboard Gray
Orange is an intense color that often looks best with other intense colors, but you don’t want to create a space that’s too vibrant when your baby will sleep there. To mitigate that brilliance, you can use neutral colors, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bold room still. Chalkboard gray and orange go well together, as you can see in this room, while maintaining a bold appearance. The neat thing about a space like this is that you can include an actual chalkboard that’ll become a toy as well as a decoration.
10) Boho Rainbow
Rainbows are always a beautiful thing to have in a nursery, so we found an orange variant for you. This boho rainbow decoration has the shape of a rainbow with various shades of orange and a colorful look that’s toned down just enough that it won’t make the room too energetic. It has a natural boho look, and including pieces of nature like rainbows may help your child develop natural intelligence and a sense of curiosity and wonder.
11) Orange and Teal
Orange and blue is a wonderful color combination because the two colors are opposites on the color wheel. They complement each other, creating a bold look, but you might want to tone down that boldness since your baby will be sleeping here. To do that, you can pick colors like teal that are still vibrant but not as bold when combined with orange as navy and orange would be. If you’re interested in a teal and orange combo, this nursery is a perfect example of how you can decorate a teal and orange nursery.
12) Line Wall Stickers
Patterns are a healthy way to stimulate an infant’s brain, so you’ll probably want to include plenty of them in your baby’s nursery. These stickers from Amazon form a pattern that’s wonderful for creating a natural look that resembles dried grass in a field or sticks in a forest. The stickers come in three shades of brown and orange and would be a wonderful way to introduce the color orange without being overwhelmingly bright or using too much intense color.
13) DIY Dried Orange Wreath
Since orange is both a fruit and a color, you can teach your baby to associate the color and fruit from an early age. This orange wreath idea is an adorable decoration, plus it should retain some orangey smell, making the room smell pleasant while appealing to multiple senses. This will help your baby make more associations between the fruit, color, and smell, and the decoration is pretty and natural. If you don’t like wasting food, you could look for faux orange slices to create a similar decoration.
14) Gold and Wood
Orange and gold look wonderful together as the gold enhances the sunny effect of the orange. You can see in this nursery how the combination of gold and stained wood creates an orangey glow without any actual orange. This would be a nice way to make a nursery look orange in a subtle way without actually buying any orange decorations or furnishings, which can be hard to find in tasteful shades and tones. You can also use mirrors or put gold items near light fixtures to make things seem sunnier.
15) Muscle Car Theme
If you like muscle cars, we found a neat example of an orange muscle car-themed nursery that you can borrow some ideas from. Some amounts of blue and brown are definitely necessary to keep the room from becoming tacky from so much orange. You can add figurines of classic cars, some of which were known for their vibrant colors that’d fit in well in an orange and blue nursery. Try including brown, blue, and orange muscle car pictures and figures.
16) White Suns on Orange
Usually, people want to put darker colors on white instead of the other way around, but white writing or drawings on dark colors tends to stand out a lot and look attractive. Since orange is a sunny color, you could get orange decorations with white suns on them like these burnt orange crib sheets that have suns dotted across them in a polka dot pattern. Patterns like this are good because they provide additional stimulation for your little one’s brain.
17) Clementine
One way to decorate with a particular color is to find things in the real world that are naturally that color. This is a great way to include nature in the nursery and help your baby begin learning about the natural world. One choice in an orange nursery is to decorate with clementines since they’re naturally orange. You can design the room with a green and orange clementine theme like this one, or focus more heavily on orange with a burnt orange or clementine orange accent wall instead of a green one.
18) Tangerines Wallpaper
Tangerines are another good choice when it comes to selecting naturally orange decorations. You can get decorations with tangerines on them like this tangerine wallpaper and then supplement them with furnishings in the same shades of green and orange. This way, you can have more than a single color theme, adding more life to the room, and you can promote a love and understanding of nature by exposing your baby to plant life early on.
19) Different Sized Polka Dots
Patterns are an excellent way to stimulate your baby’s mind early on, so you’ll probably want some orange patterns in this room. One neat way to make the area look different from a typical nursery is to get polka dots like these that are multiple different sizes to add some randomness without removing the stimulating aspect of the dots. These would make a wonderful accent wall since they could be overwhelming on all four walls, but you’ll have to judge how they’d look in your nursery space.
20) DIY Sea Creature Mobile
You might not have expected that you could create a sea creature theme in an orange nursery, but a blue, tan, and orange room could be a wonderful sea-themed space. You can make decorations like this blue and orange mobile with sea creatures on it, or even create the sea creature mobile and place it in a non-thematic room. The soft knit sea creatures will create a soft look which is excellent for sleeping while the knit texture will be more stimulating than a flat or smooth texture would be.
21) Orange, Mint, and Navy Tribal Pattern
Orange goes well with blues and greens since blue is opposite orange on the color wheel, and the two combined make green. This means that orange and blue have a striking look when combined, and mint green can help blend the two colors together to soften the effect without diminishing its beauty. A mint green, navy, and orange combination like the one on this tribal pattern divider set is the perfect match for an orange nursery.
22) White Plants and Letters on Orange
White on orange is a bold combination that looks good in most cases, and there are a few ways you can take advantage of this in a nursery. For example, you can get a stencil or decals to create white trees or branches like the ones in this nursery. You can also get or paint white letters on an orange background, either in a simple style or a more ornate one like the letters in this article.
23) Orange Leaves Fitted Sheet
While most people think of green as a natural color and associate it with plant life, there are many orange plants, as well. You can design a beautiful autumn nursery with orange leafy decorations like these crib sheets with an orange background and white plants. Decals of trees with orange leaves are another good option, and you can mix green with orange and other fall colors like red and yellow to create a more complete fall theme.
24) Orange, Blue, and Green Patterns
Patterns are important in nurseries because they’re a good way to stimulate a baby’s mind, and since orange is an intense color, it’s a good idea to break it up with patterns. Similarly, blue makes a good contrast for orange but is intense enough that you might not want large areas of solid blue. This nursery from Project Nursery is a good example of a patterned nursery because it has blue, orange, and green patterns. The green and the chevron pattern help tie the colors together.
25) Burnt Orange
If you don’t want a gaudy orange choice, burnt orange might be the best option for your nursery. You can get burnt orange furniture like this toy chest with tribal or natural patterns that blend well with tans, browns, and even greens. This is a deeper color that seems more natural than most oranges but still has the cheerfulness and intensity of any other orange. This color looks good with arrow, herringbone, and tribal patterns in particular.
What other orange nursery ideas could we have included in our list? We’d love to hear what you’ve found. Please let us know in the comments below!
