Inside the Whimsical Nursery Rumer Willis Created for Her Daughter, Louetta

As actor Rumer Willis and her partner, Derek Richard Thomas, prepared to welcome her first baby, Louetta Isley Thomas Willis, to the world, she also prepared her home. She redid her kitchen. She decluttered. She added a rocking chair to the dining room so she’d have a place to sit with Louetta where she herself could still be in the presence of others. Like most expecting parents, she also worked on creating a nursery for baby Louetta to call her own. To help with that process, Rumer partnered with Crate & Kids, using the brand’s Design Desk service. Along with the team at the Design Desk, she created 3D renderings of what would become the whimsical space. She also created a registry on Crate & Kids, should admirers wish to easily shop the look of her nursery space. As it stands now, the room nods to baby Louetta’s lineage with a gallery wall filled with pictures of extended family, and it also reflects the design tastes that Rumer picked up from her parents, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. 

Below, we talk to Willis about her favorite pieces, the inspiration for the room, and how the space has affected her first few months of parenthood. 

AD: I know you did a home birth, and you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into the nursery design. What does home mean to you as a new mother?

Rumer Willis: I think you’re creating container for this kind of amazing event to happen. For me, it was really important to have everything not feel cluttered and have everything feel inviting and cozy. I have a lot of Libra in my chart, so I’m all about coziness and textures and softness. So there were cozy blankets everywhere, and I had some sheep skins on the floor.

But it was really important to me to try and have her nursery, and even my bedroom, kind of dialed in in a way that felt like, “Okay, I’m not going to the hospital. I’m going to be here, and this is the space that I’m bringing my daughter into the world, so I want everything to really feel safe and calm for me.” Luckily, my mom and my sisters and my partner and everyone really rallied the couple of weeks leading up to when she was born to really help get our house ready.

You and your partner are both creatives. How much of the design for the nursery was bringing that creativity in for her?

I felt like my aesthetic was kind of Wes Anderson by way of Havana, with a little bit of whimsy. I didn’t want it to be overly girly, because that’s not really who I am. I’m not a frilly person, though my daughter might end up being that way at some point. I just wanted to work with a lot of color because it’s not something I normally do. A lot of the rest of my house is really beautiful, neutral tones, but I wanted her room to have just a sense of fun and wonder and almost like you’re being transported to this different world. My partner was on tour while I was pregnant and found this beautiful little guitar that he named Baby, so we wanted that for her to bring in pieces of music.

This incredible artist, Selena, made that really cool funky painting that’s in there. I’m a huge fan of collage walls. There’s drawings that my little sister Tallulah did on the nursery collage wall. There’s a photo of us from my baby shower. I want to keep adding more to it, even. There’s a painting of my sister Scout, and so there’s all these different pieces of her lineage as a female in our family.

Could you talk about the specific furniture pieces you chose? What drew you to them?

The Jenny Lind crib was the first thing that I saw that I loved because it has a sense of whimsy without being too girly. I thought even if you had a little boy and you just dressed it in a different way that you could still use it. I also wanted to be able to use the room really functionally because the nursery also functions as our guest room. I wanted to be able to put a queen bed in there, which magically fit and it came in the same spindles, and there’s a bookcase, too, that matches.

I think far and away my favorite is the big chair in the corner. I love it because I love the idea of having a place that can really grow with her, where she can sit, even at six months old, maybe she could start sitting on the back because it’s so structured, and then she could sit with her friends on there too. I totally got all sentimental and thought about this idea of when she’s a little bit older and is able to read books there. She’s got all her stuffies in her bookshelf right next to it. It also reminds me a lot of my dad. My dad was all about the big, big furniture and oversized things, and I’ve definitely taken a lot after my dad. But I just like this idea of also playing with size in the room, like you have this big chair that almost looks like it could be for a giant or something, bringing in kind of a sense of whimsy for a child.

What made you want to wallpaper the space?

I’ve never worked with wallpaper before, so I was a little intimidated to do something so bold. But then Kim, the designer that I was working with from Crate & Kids, started putting together one of those models, and I was like, Wow, this is even better than I could have possibly imagined. I created a Pinterest board and a registry on Crate & Kids to collect my ideas because I’m very much like that. I need to see everything together. When I saw how the wallpaper paired with the blinds, I was just blown away, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the room.

How do you think that the process of creating the nursery mentally prepared you for having the baby?

It’s so weird. It’s one of those things that some people say turns on towards the end of your pregnancy. I felt this immediate need, even from when I was very early pregnant, to just start organizing everything. I was like, “Stuff’s got to go. We got to start getting rid of stuff.” I was like, “We’ve got to redo the whole kitchen.” It’s, like, this need to create this container, this cocoon that you’re bringing this new little human into. 

Every time I walk into Lou’s room, I’m delighted. I immediately start smiling anytime I’m going to put her clothes on for the day and I see her little closet.

Are there any particular things that maybe you were hesitant about or you just didn’t really think about but are glad to have in the nursery?

My mom always seems to think that I put furniture that’s too big in spaces that don’t necessarily fit it, and we even had to do some jimmyrigging to get that chair through the doorway. So I had this moment where I was like, Man, this chair is going to be stuck in here now. But once again, once it all came together, I was like, Oh, yeah. Because I had an idea for maybe just doing a rocking chair there originally, and then as I was putting together the furniture that I was liking and I saw that chair, I was like, “No way. This is it. This has to be in there. No matter what other pieces are in there, this chair just has to be there.” It delights me.

Is there anything in the room that you added just for the guests or maybe even just for yourself when you’re in the room with Lou?

I think I really wanted to make it her room and her space for as she gets older. When adults come to stay, they just know that she’s being generous enough to let them stay in her room.