When people think about designing a nursery, the focus almost always goes to the obvious: the crib, the rocker, the paint color, or wallpaper. Those choices matter. They’re what make it feel real — what turn an abstract idea into a space waiting for someone small to arrive.
What we didn’t fully understand until we became parents is that there’s another layer to the nursery — one that works quietly in the background and rarely gets the same attention. Not because it’s secret, but because you don’t notice it until you need it. It’s the 3 am version of the room. The one where the overhead light is suddenly too harsh, the air feels too dry, and you realize you have nowhere practical to throw that dirty burpcloth.
This is a list of those things. Some are obvious, like a baby monitor. Others are easy to overlook, like a laundry basket. They’re not what defines how a nursery looks, but they define how it works — how a routine gets built and how it feels to live in, day after day (and night after night).
The Hatch
More than a sound machine — it’s a clock, a lamp, and a programmable routine in one device.
Here’s a scenario we lived: it’s some time between midnight and 3am, you’re in the rocking chair feeding your newborn, and you need to note the time because documenting feeds is a real and important part of those early weeks. Your phone is unreachable, there’s no clock visible in the dark, and the only light option involves getting up and hitting the overhead switch. That was us, night one.
By night two, the Hatch was out of the box and set up next to the rocker. One tap is Evie’s bottle light — soft enough for a feed without waking anyone. A second tap is white noise for sleep. And the clock is always visible in a soft glow. There’s an app that many of our friends swear by, but after initial setup, we rarely open it since the physical controls are that intuitive. Every night is the same sequence, and at nine months Evie now associates it with sleep in a way that makes bedtime genuinely smooth.
Rest+ 2nd Gen and Rest Go Bundle | Hatch Baby Sound Machine
The PureBaby Sound Sleeper
Evie is devoted to her PureBaby Sound Sleeper — we call him Diaper Bear, which tells you everything about where he spends most of his time. He lives on the changing table and has become just as important for calming her through a diaper change as he is for getting her to sleep at night.
The Hatch | The Hiccapop Wipes Warmer | The Purebaby sound sleeper
If you’re wondering why we use both this and the Hatch — it’s a fair question. The Hatch runs white noise continuously all night — a non-negotiable when you share a wall with loud neighbors in a New York City apartment. The PureBaby Sound Sleeper plays lullabies that ease her into sleep and then shuts off after 20 minutes on its own. They’re doing two different jobs, and the combination works better than either one alone.
We haven’t used the light projector much yet, but we have a feeling that’s coming. If bears aren’t your thing, there’s also an elephant and a unicorn version.
Purebaby sound sleeper
The Wipes Container
Baby wipes these days come in convenient packs with easy-open lids — but a dedicated container with a one-touch system is one of those small upgrades that earns its place immediately. You don’t realize how much you’re fumbling with a wipes pack until you’re holding a newborn with one hand and trying to open it with the other. Wipe containers come in two versions: heated and non-heated. We have both.
The heated ones are either plugged in or come with a charging base so they can move from room to room. Our Hiccapop wipes warmer lives plugged in at the changing station in the nursery, and our OXO non-heated version stays in the kitchen for sticky hands and faces after feeding.
The warmer, especially, is worth considering for newborns — a cold wipe on a newborn’s bottom is its own category of problem. It won’t eliminate crying but it removes one reliable cause of it, which in those early weeks feels significant. Heated or not, a proper wipes container will make the dozens of changes a week meaningfully easier. It’s rarely the first thing on anyone’s registry and it probably should be higher up.
The Blackout Curtains
If you live in New York City, you already know light pollution is real — but it’s easy to forget about it when you’re designing a nursery and focused on how the window looks.
Here’s the reminder: your baby is going to need to sleep in the middle of the day, every day, for a long time. Proper blackout curtains are crucial, and you want them hung and working the day you bring your baby home.
A few things worth knowing before you buy. Width and hang height matter as much as the curtains themselves — they need to be wide enough and mounted high enough to cover the full window with no light bleeding in at the edges.
If your provider offers side channels, say yes without hesitation. They’re the tracks that run along the sides of the shade and eliminate the gap where light sneaks in. We almost skipped them without fully understanding what they were, which would have been a mistake. Even with ours — which are slightly too short because we were too lazy to have them corrected — the difference they make is significant. When in doubt, size up, hang high, and get the side channels.
We went with chain-controlled roller shades from The Shade Company, which solved the aesthetics problem entirely. During wake windows they roll up and disappear — you’d never know they were there. We hung sheer curtains on a rod in front of them for softness and style, so the window looks intentional rather than functional. Best of both worlds, and genuinely the approach we’d recommend to anyone who wants the room to look good and work properly at the same time.
The Fan
Circulated air is a must-have — fans have been shown to help reduce the risk of SIDS, and most NYC apartments don’t have ceiling fans. I’ve owned a Vornado VFAN Sr. Vintage in green for more than a decade, so it was an easy first choice when thinking about Evie’s room. Evie’s fan lives on top of her bookshelf, pointed slightly at the crib, and has been running continuously for all nine months. It circulates air, contributes to a safer sleep environment, doubles as white noise, and looks genuinely beautiful doing all of it.
Vornado VFAN Sr.
The Nanit
We could write an entire post about baby monitors — and we will — because parents have very strong opinions about WiFi-enabled vs. not and the options are genuinely overwhelming. What we’ll say here: the Nanit has given us a specific kind of peace of mind that’s hard to explain until you have it. We can check on her from our phones, and we keep a dedicated iPad as a monitor that we can also share with babysitters. We never used the breathing tracking feature but the sleep data and the ability to check on her without opening the door has been invaluable. It’s also extremely easy to pack up and take to other people’s houses or hotels and have it work perfectly anywhere there is WiFi access.
A note on temperature: We noticed some discrepancies with the Nanit’s temperature reading — likely because it sits higher up than where Evie actually sleeps, and heat rises. Our pediatrician recommended keeping the room between 68–72°F, so we added a separate digital thermometer as a backup. Simple fix, good peace of mind.
Nanit baby monitor | Indoor Digital Thermometer
The Humidifier
Steam heat in NYC apartments is aggressive and dry air is genuinely uncomfortable for a baby. We have the Levoit LV600HH Hybrid Ultrasonic Humidifier in Evie’s room and it works perfectly. We use distilled water exclusively and have had no issues with mold or mineral buildup. The one thing we’d change: get the version with app control, the Levoit LV600S Smart Warm and Cool Mist Humidifier. We have a different Levoit model in our own room that’s app-controlled and assumed the one on our registry worked the same way — it doesn’t. There have been nights we’ve tiptoed back into a sleeping baby’s room to turn it on manually when a phone tap would have solved it. Learn from us.
LEVOIT LV600S Smart Warm and Cool Mist Humidifier | Levoit Smart cool mist
The Air Purifier
NYC air quality is its own conversation, but it’s not the only reason an air purifier made the necessities list. New furniture and products off-gas fumes when you first bring them home, pets move through the space, and seasonal changes affect air quality in ways you notice more once you have a baby. This is where the designer in me takes the wheel — I’ve had the original Molekule since it launched in 2017, so the Molekule Air Mini+ was an easy choice for Evie’s room. Are there other, cheaper air purifiers that work just as well? Probably. But there’s something to be said for actually enjoying the objects in your home that are doing important work, or at minimum not noticing them at all.
Molekule Air Purifier Mini+
The Dimmable Lamp
Maybe the Hatch solves this for you, but no overhead lighting in our nursery meant we needed a solution that could go from bright enough for playtime to dim enough for bedtime. The Crate & Barrel Dexter Arc Floor Lamp with White Shade — a piece we already owned from our previous apartment — solved it completely. It has a built-in dimmer, which means you set the level once and, in our case, control it from the wall switch. Simple, functional, already ours.
Whatever you use, the principle is the same: some kind of controllable light source in a nursery is non-negotiable. The scenarios you’ll need it for are endless.
Crate and Barrel Dexter Arc Floor Lamp with White Shade
The Entertainment
One thing that doesn’t come up enough in nursery planning: where does the baby go when you need to put them down for twenty minutes? Not to sleep — just somewhere safe and occupied while you get dressed, make coffee, or exist as a person for a moment. For us the answer showed up in two ways: the activity gym and a battery-operated mobile.
The Lovevery Play Gym has been out in Evie’s room since week one and hasn’t moved. It’s kept pace with every stage, allows us to mix and match with Evie’s current favorite toys, and at nine months, is still the most-used object in the nursery — as much a place for us to gather and play with her as it is a place where she can entertain herself independently.
Lovevery Play Gym
The mobile is the less obvious one, and the one we’d push people to think about more. The Pinterest and Etsy versions are beautiful, but a stationary mobile is a decoration. What actually buys you twenty minutes is something that moves and plays music. The designer in me resisted, but I found the Peanutshell Montessori Neutral Musical Crib Mobile at Target, and I could work with that. It stays out of sight most of the time, which means when it comes out it’s still a novelty — and a reliable one. We call them Evie’s Friends, and putting her under them in the crib buys us enough time to finish getting ready to leave the house. That’s not a small thing in the early months, and it’s rarely on the nursery checklist.
The Peanutshell Montessori Neutral Musical Crib Mobile
The Diaperpail
There are a lot of diaper pails on the market and most lead with smell containment — but how they contain it varies significantly and it matters more than you’d think in daily use. I did a deep dive before committing to the Dekor Eko Classic.
My sister has the Ubbi, which I liked aesthetically, but the sliding top mechanism wasn’t practical for real life. When your hands are full and likely dirty in the middle of a diaper change, unlocking and sliding open a small top opening is one step too many. I looked exclusively for foot pedal-operated pails with strong smell containment reviews, which at the time narrowed it down to the Munchkin® STEP™ Diaper Pail Powered by Arm & Hammer and the Dekor Eko Classic. The Munchkin® STEP™ relies on Arm & Hammer scented pods to control odor. The Dekor Eko uses a double flap system instead, which felt like the cleaner solution.
One thing I initially resisted: almost all diaper pails require their own proprietary bags. I’ve made peace with it. The system works and the bag replacements are straightforward. Nine months in the Dekor Eko has been nothing but positive — usability, smell control, bag replacement and all. We recommend it to everyone who asks.
Dekor EKO Classic Diaper Pail
The Laundry Basket
Laundry is probably not on your mind when you’re designing a nursery — but babies generate an astonishing amount of it. If you’re using a sensitive detergent like Tide Free & Gentle or Dreft, which most pediatricians recommend, you’re also washing baby clothes separately from everything else. That means a dedicated laundry basket in the nursery isn’t optional; it’s just a question of which one.
We saw it as an opportunity. The West Elm Kids bear laundry basket is practical, lidded to manage odors, and genuinely delightful — the kind of object that makes you smile every time you walk past it. Dirty onesies have never looked cuter.
West Elm Bear Basket
The Backups
Have backups of everything and know exactly where they are. Burp cloths, blankets, pacifiers, diapers, wipes, and diaper pail refills. Not stored away neatly out of sight — accessible, within arm’s reach of where you actually use them.
A basket of blankets and burp cloths next to the rocker means you’re not getting up in the middle of a feed or disturbing a sleeping baby to grab one from across the room. Extra diapers and wipes stocked in a drawer close to the changing table means a midnight diaper change stays a midnight diaper change and doesn’t turn into a midnight trip to Duane Reade. That last one is personal experience.
Before Baby Comes Home
We tend to design nurseries with an eye toward how things look — everything in its place, nothing out of order. But somewhere between the moodboard and move-in day, this layer tends to get skipped. Not because it’s unimportant, but because nobody hands you the list.
We’re handing you the list.
Get this layer right before the baby arrives and you’ll thank yourself at 3 am when everything is running exactly as it should. If you want to see how we thought about the rest of Evie’s room — the design decisions, the furniture, the art — that’s all in our nursery reveal post.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products we actually use and love.
Things We Love in Evie’s Nursery:
- West Elm x PBK Mid-Century 4-in-1 Convertible Crib
- Newton Original Crib Mattress
- Crate & Kids Imperfect Checkerboard Wool Rug
- Monte Design Como Glider
- West Elm Gumdrop Ottoman
- Keekaroo Peanut Changer
- Hiccapop Wipe Warmer
- Dekor Eko Diaper Pail
- Hatch Sound Machine
- PureBaby Sound Sleeper
- Nanit Monitor
- Vornado VFAN Sr.
- Levoit Humidifier
- Molekule Air Purifier Mini+
- Lovevery Play Gym
- The Peanutshell Montessori Neutral Musical Crib Mobile
- Crate and Barrel Rue Bookshelf
- Poppin Bins
- West Elm Bear Laundry Basket
- Etsy Australian Animal Prints
- Etsy World Map
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