I spent a morning last week working on a room design for my youngest client, she's a 7 year old ballerina and like most little girls, she LOVES pink and ruffles and bows and candy stripes and fringe trims and pretty much anything frilly and girly. She's never looked at a design magazine in her life, nor watched a single design show on tv,,,,,and has no interest in Philip Stark ghost chairs, Kelly Wearstler prints or Jonathan Adler furniture,,,,,well, unless its frilly or pink or sparkly then that's all she cares about.
This little girl and her mother are getting ready to move-in to their newly furnished house in about 4 weeks. I've been working with them since October on completely furnishing and outfitting their entire 3 bed side-split and with most of the other living areas nearing completion I've been focusing on the bedrooms this month, along with a million other small details!!! (this project in conjunction with furnishing the Bachelor's condo has been a crazy couple months of marathon shopping!) The little girl's bedroom is tiny, measuring only about 10' x 10' with an 8' ceiling, a small window and has no architectural features at all. The walls had just been freshly painted when I came on board, they're a light peachy melon colour and repainting was not an option so I'm working with it. With a small budget, I decided to allocate a large portion of the budget to a custom upholstered headboard, bed skirt and window treatment.
I made a quick trip to Designer Fabric Outlets and picked out a strawberry coloured velvet and a multi-coloured stripe. The solid colour headboard will grow with her into her teens as will the stripe, the lighter peachy colour seen in the stripe fabric is similar to the wall colour and gives us the colour palette for the rest of the bedding which will be ready-made. Next, I sketched up the design for the headboard and sent it all off to my upholsterer - fingers crossed it will all be ready before move-in!
With the headboard and custom skirt and window treatment being made the rest of the room will be filled in with some ready made, in-stock pieces and vintage finds. I had a lucky day last week when I came across this french style dressing table in a consignment shop, painted white with a peachy glaze on the edges it was like it was made for the colour scheme of this room. I scooped it up and headed off to the lighting showroom where I picked out a couple of sparkly pretty chandeliers,,,,I'll run these by my little client today and see which one she prefers....
All Photos & Sketches: Carol Reed
