A well thought out playroom will stimulate children's imaginations, writes Robert O'Byrne

The playroom: ideally all of our childhoods featured one of these. A place in which adults were barely tolerated, and then only on the condition they brought something for us to eat or drink.

Somewhere we could take refuge on days when bad weather made the garden inaccessible. A place that, with the vividness of a child's imagination, could be transformed into anything we wanted to make it: a fort; a castle; a ship. A room for storing toys and games and the accumulated bits and pieces we thought of as treasures (like driftwood picked up on the beach or that bit of blanket we'd cherished since infancy) but our parents considered rubbish and wouldn't allow elsewhere in the house.

Because that's the distinctive feature of a good playroom: it's a refuge from adulthood and the one spot at home where the concerns of children are given unconditional precedence.

That's very much the approach adopted by Gail Kilroy whose three daughters Daisy (eight), Lulu (six) and Bo (three) have their own playroom in the family's Monkstown home. To begin with, the playroom has been sensibly sited on the lower groundfloor; well away from the smart reception rooms upstairs but just a short skip across the passage from the big family kitchen. In other words, sufficiently removed for the girls to close the door should they want to have some private time but near enough for Gail or her husband to hear any sounds of distress or dispute.

It also offers a very necessary escape from the largest of the two family dogs, a Labradoodle called Summer, who all three girls love madly, but who can sometimes get a little too boisterous.

As for the room itself, Gail has wisely adopted a pragmatic approach. The floor is uncarpeted, for example, because she'd soon enough find the pile of a carpet thick with crayon stubs or clumps of paint and Plasticine or bits of a little Barbie bracelet that went missing three weeks ago. Instead, the floor is tiled, making it easy to clean on a regular basis.

The room isn't too bare, it has a rug that Gail plans to replace with something larger but, most important of all, there's underfloor heating so she doesn't have to worry about her daughters catching cold. Just as sensibly, the amount of solid furniture is kept to a decent minimum; after all, it's hard for a child to transform a room into a castle when it's already fully furnished.

But the one key item here is a big, comfortable chocolate brown leather sofa from the Conran Shop which formerly sat in the kitchen of the Kilroy's previous home. That's a great feature of playrooms: they're ideal for recycling items too good to throw away but not smart enough for more public areas or out of kilter with the rest of the house's decorative scheme. Hence the brown leather sofa has been not so much banished as bequeathed to the playroom where it received a warm welcome. Other parents please note: if it's large and squishy and able to withstand intensive use, send it to the playroom. That in the Kilroy household has walls painted a plain off-white, another example of common sense triumphing over any fancy ideas. Children, after all, do like to draw and sometimes the best outlet for their creativity is a large expanse of wall, preferably one with a surface responsive to damp cloths. Obviously there's a chalkboard here as well, since the Kilroy girls are well-behaved and can generally contain their outbursts of artistry within its frame. And there's a small television, a very small one, says Gail, which isn't watched all that often and only when members of the family want to watch different programmes.

Much bigger, indeed the dominant presence in this playroom, are the storage cupboards. Which is just as it should be, because the three girls have their fair share of toys and if these aren't to lie scattered about that regularly-cleaned floor, they need to be stored somewhere.

Gail confesses to having a "bit of an obsession" about tidiness and she insists that every night the girls put their things away. Hence the plentiful cupboards, which came from Amelia Aran on York Road in Dún Laoghaire. "You buy the different units and then assemble them as you want," explains Gail.

The cupboards are even big enough to hold a metal-framed play house which "goes up and comes down depending on the girls' mood". There's lots of pink, lots of things that are fluffy and sparkly and shiny. Inevitably, given that Gail has three daughters, the playroom's all very girly, except for what is described as the "token boy toy": Thomas the Tank Engine, who looks a bit out of place in this environment and might be happier mucking about with Summer the rumbustious Labradoodle.

Playroom: key elements

1Plain painted walls: no point in that expensive wallpaper being covered in crayon

2Lots and lots of storage space (and when you think there's enough, add more)

3Old, albeit comfortable, furniture

4Hard-wearing flooring

5A strict tidy-up policy at the end of every day

6 Simple decoration: the room's a crucible for the development of a child's imagination