Themes

• The best way to chose a decorating theme is to find a fabric you love. It is easier to match wall colors and furniture to a fabric, but it is difficult to find a fabric that matches paint. Look for a crib blanket or curtains that you want to use in your nursery. You can use a generic baby theme like ABCs, zoo animals or Winnie the Pooh. You can also find themes that translate easily into use for older children or adults, such as black and white or patchwork quilt. If you choose a theme that can be adapted for use when your child is older, your room will be more versatile.
  
  Once you have the bedding chosen, find curtains that match. These can be part of a set that is designed to go together, or they can be a fabric that goes well with the bedding. You can use solid color curtains that match an accent color from the bedding. If you use a patterned fabric for your curtains that is not part of a set with the bedding, be careful to look at them side by side to make sure they match well. It is difficult to match patterns that are not designed to go together, so you are better off buying a matching set.
  
  

Colors

• The traditional gender-neutral colors are green and yellow, but do not limit yourself to those colors. As long as you do not use pink or blue as a main color, the entire palette of colors is wide open for your room. Choose an accent color from your fabric to use in your walls. You can use a neutral, understated color like beige, sage, light brown, peach or off-white. Pure white is another good unisex choice; white used to be the traditional color for babies before most parents found out the gender in advance, and a pure white nursery is still a beautiful unisex choice. If you want something more dramatic and exciting for your walls, consider red, chocolate brown, orange or even black. If you want a truly bright room, consider using a primary colors scheme and painting each wall a different color, or just painting one wall a different color from the others and using a third primary color in the trim.
  
  You can also use pink and blue as accent colors in a unisex room, especially if you use both. For example, you can mix turquoise with green or yellow for a gender-neutral look. Chocolate brown with pale blue will also work for a boy or a girl. And a patchwork quilt that includes both pink and blue squares can be perfect for either gender, especially if the pink is not too prominent.
  
  

Accents

• Finish your decorating with accents like trim, rugs, pictures and lamps. If you really want your room to look complete, use pictures that include colors that match the theme for your room, and make sure the colors in your pictures go well with the colors in the room. If you use too many colors in the room, it will look confused and overdone. If you already have several main colors, then keep to the colors you have already used in the trim. For example, if your bedding is a patchwork quilt with yellow, green, brown, and peach; your walls are yellow; and your curtains are green, then you should use green for most of your trim, with only a little bit of brown or peach.
  
  Finally, you can always keep the option of making your nursery more gender-specific later by using colors that go well with baby blue and baby pink. For example, you can use sage green as your main color with yellow trimmings. If you want to later, you can add brown accents for a boy or pink accents for a girl.