Harry Potter bedroom ideas for adults and kids, with a shopping list for each

The best Harry Potter bedroom ideas are simple ones: pick a house palette, add one hero piece like a trunk, fake a stone or panelled wall, and light the room with lamps and LED candles instead of the overhead light. That holds for a nine-year-old’s room and a grown-up’s guest room, but the two shouldn’t look the same.

So this guide splits the two on purpose. You’ll find ideas for a kid’s room and a separate set for an adult’s, with a priced shopping list for each.

What makes a room feel like Hogwarts, not a gift shop

Restraint. One large item is worth more than ten small ones.

Choose your hero. It can be the trunk that sits at the foot of your bed, the stone wall, or the group of gilded portraits. Then allow everything else in the room to be normal and beautifully crafted: dark wood, brass, wool, velvet, leather-bound volumes. In the movies, Hogwarts is primarily stone and lit by candles. Almost nothing has a brand name on it.

A Harry Potter room tips into gift shop when the plastic piles up. A molded Sorting Hat beside a light-up Hedwig beside a shelf of vinyl figures reads as merchandise. A secondhand brass owl from eBay reads as something a wizard might own.

How to pick a house palette

Most Harry Potter bedroom ideas start and end with Gryffindor, because Harry was in it. You have four houses to choose from, and each has fixed colors:

Use the dominant color on one large area, like a wall or the curtains. Keep the metal for smaller details: frames, lamp bases, and drawer handles. Slytherin green combined with old silver is by far the simplest choice for a grown-up to use. Ravenclaw blue with bronze comes in second.

There is a fifth choice for adults who want the look without the dormitory feel: black, silver, and dark wood. Call it the Deathly Hallows color combination. A black wall with silver hardware and a walnut headboard recalls the later movies, and no one needs to know why. That palette is close to a modern dark academia bedroom, if you want to take the look further.

What furniture and architecture actually fits

Begin with the trunk. Every student arrives with one, so it says Hogwarts without any label. Place it at the foot of the bed for extra blanket storage or use a flat-topped one as a coffee table.

Next, you will need to mimic the building itself. There are two main techniques that will make it happen.

Peel-and-stick stone or brick wallpaper will give you a dormitory wall within hours and is removable when you leave the place. It needs smooth walls to stick to, so don’t use this trick on textured ones.

Picture-frame moulding gives your plain drywall some structure. Thin strips glued or nailed into rectangles and painted the same color as the wall are enough to pass for old panelling. Dark paint does a lot of the work here, and these moody decor ideas list the shades that hold up in a normal house.

Harry Potter room decor that does the most work

The lighting goes first: switch off the overhead light and use lamps, warm string lights, or floating LED candles hung from fishing line. LED candles are fire safe, so they can hang close to bed curtains. If you burn real candles, keep them well away from fabric. To go further, paint a night sky above the bed and thread fiber-optic stars through it.

And then comes the wand idea. Wand-shaped universal remotes do actually exist (the Kymera wand and the Harry Potter version by The Noble Collection are examples). These wands use infrared, not Wi-Fi, so you need an infrared remote-control outlet or an IR hub for them to turn lamps on. Set up that way, one wand can run an electric fireplace, the candles and a speaker. If you’d rather run the lamps from your phone, compare smart bulbs and smart switches first.

The best wall art is free. The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides more than 492,000 images of artwork, which are already in the public domain and available for any use under a Creative Commons Zero license. Browse the online gallery, look for the “OA” icon and download the portrait of a stern Renaissance merchant or a duchess wearing a ruff. Print it, then frame it with moulding painted gold. It will look like a portrait from Hogwarts and only cost you some ink.

Paper props can be aged with coffee. Print a Hogwarts acceptance letter, stain it with the help of a sponge moistened with cooled strong coffee and leave it to dry. Test the corner first if you used an inkjet printer, as the ink could smear.

Textiles come last: velvet curtains, a wool throw and one cushion in the color of your choice. That’s most of the Harry Potter room decor you need.

Two rooms you can copy

These two lists turn the Harry Potter bedroom ideas above into things you can buy. Prices were checked at the time of writing and will move.

The kid’s room: about $257

Three rolls cover about 92 sq. ft., which is enough for a 10-foot wall with an 8-foot ceiling. Lion-head rings on the chest would be appropriate for Gryffindor. Candles will require 24 AA batteries, which are not included. Without the chest, the cost of the room will amount to about $190.

The adult’s room: about $430

The trunk accounts for more than half of the total price. Buy an old one secondhand and everything else will cost you about $184. A wand remote will add another $20 to $50.

Budget and renter swaps

Most Harry Potter room decor has a cheaper version, and usually one a landlord won’t mind.

How to keep it from looking like a theme park

Overkill is the major concern for fans. Some simple steps will come in handy.

First, try counting the number of logos visible from the doorway. If there are more than three, get rid of some.

Buy only things that would suit the room even if the books didn’t exist. The trunk and the brass lamp fit well. The plastic Golden Snitch does not. Stick to Harry Potter bedroom ideas built on ordinary old-house details, with one or two clues added.

Keep collectibles grouped by theme, potions on one shelf and Gringotts on another. That reads as a display instead of clutter.

Leave some wall space blank.

As far as kids go, loosen all of that advice. Give them their duvet and their banner. If the rest of the room stays grown-up, it’ll still look great when they turn fourteen. The same approach works for other fandoms. See our Marvel bedroom ideas, Batman bedroom ideas and Hello Kitty room ideas.

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