Paper Popup Room

The paper popup room is a great way to prototype designs for a room, or even just make fun creative room decor elements using paper. One of the greatest things about it is that it is SO customizable, so you can literally add anything from your imagination into this project!

This tutorial has just the basics, a bed, table and shelf folded into a popup room, but we would recommend adding your own designs into this to make it your own!

To watch a video tutorial on this, check out the link below!

Materials:

• Template (or sheets of paper, if you want to design your own) you can find here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PgM5Amwsf...
• Paper cutter/ blade or scissors
• Ruler/scale
• Regular Stationery to decorate (pencil, pens, colours etc)

We have 2 basic structural elements to a popup room, the floor, and the walls. You can use the template we have or make your own using the measurements we have provided in this folder.

In our template, the dark bold lines (outlines) are to be cut out using a paper cutter/ scissors, and the dotted lines are to be scored using a scale/ruler and folded.

IMPORTANT: If you are making your own template, make sure to customize and decorate your elements before you paste them into the room.

Cut out the floor and wall pieces from our template using a pair of scissors or a paper cutter. The paper cutter can be more convenient.

Using a paper cutter or the edge of a ruler/scale, score along the dotted lines, and fold to make crisp and precise folds as shown. You will see that the floor piece has 3 folds, 2 small flaps and a diagonal fold. The flaps will be used to attach the floor to the wall.

You can glue the walls and floor pieces together by either positioning the flaps on the inside of the walls, or on the outside, as shown in the images. We chose to stick the flaps to the inner parts of the walls as shown.

Glue the first flap to the wall as shown. Then, fold along the diagonal line carefully, and glue the second flap. Fold along the diagonal line and press, to develop the folds. You can place heavy objects on the fold for this.

The basic popup room structure is ready! It folds along the diagonal line on the floor, and opens up to popup the floorplan as shown.

We will now populate the room. Each element has to be pasted such that one part of it sticks to the wall, and one to the floor.

Cut out the bed element from our template (or make your own) and fold along the dotted lines. Fold it such that the side with the two flaps is pasted to the floor, and the other sticks to the wall as shown.

Ensure that the elements are glued such that no portion of it lies on the diagonal line. This is to ensure that the popup room can smoothly fold and collapse when closed.

For each elements, it is important that once the glue dries, we fold the popup room structure along the folds of the flaps of the element and press firmly. This is to ensure that all our folds develop properly and look neat.

Now repeat this with the shelf element. Fold the flaps such that this time, the end with two flaps is stuck to the wall, and the other is stuck to the floor. Stick it carefully in the room such that it does not overlap with the diagonal line on the floor.

Fold the popup room again and press firmly to develop the folds.

Using the same methods, add the table to the room. You can play around the positioning of the different elements, and add things like picture frames, or chairs, or even a floor rug! You can cut out a window and add curtains. Whatever you do, you just have to ensure that the elements do not overlap with the diagonal fold.

Feel free to play around with this technique to design a bedroom, or any other room in your house. You can add them all back to back to design a popup house, or even add stairs, windows, and make something like our Chettinad house (DM us on Instagram for the template)