Before & After: A “Plain Box” Bedroom Is Now Bold, Blue, and Has a Real Boat as Storage

Two guiding principles led to the design of 3-year-old Leo’s bedroom for Los Angeles-based interior designer and documentary filmmaker Reilly Dowd. For starters, she wanted to prove that “a room with no beautiful ‘features’ to begin with could be the most magical space in the house.” Secondly, Reilly wanted her son to be the “editor-in-chief” of his room’s design. 

“My whole belief is that a child is a person with a worldview, not a theme — so I made him a real room, with the same design integrity as the rest of the house, built to grow up alongside him,” Reilly explains. “Leo’s nursery had a gentle circus-and-hot-air-balloon idea and was more restrained; this room is the grown-up evolution of that, designed a little beyond his current age so he grows into it rather than out of it.” 

When Reilly set out to design this bedroom, she says there wasn’t a lot going on in it. It was only 9 by 11 feet, lacked natural light, and looked like “a kind of plain box people would just push furniture into,” she says. 

Reilly took Leo to the paint store, where she laid out six shades of blue, and he selected Farrow & Ball’s “Cook’s Blue” (a color she’d loved for many years before this project). From there, he helped where he could, including painting the walls blue, campaigning for glossy red woodwork, and serving as the curator of what does and doesn’t belong on his shelves — it changes daily. “A child who feels like he built his room lives in it completely differently than one handed a finished one,” Reilly says.

Speaking of Leo’s shelves, they’re built inside of a real boat — unsurprisingly, Leo’s favorite part of the room. Reilly spotted the $150 listing on Facebook Marketplace, picked it up in New Mexico, and shipped it to California. It’s actually a secretary desk; Reilly temporarily removed the flip-down portion, installing it as a lower shelf that Leo can reach. Someday, when he’s big enough, Reilly plans to turn the boat shelves back into a desk. 

“The [room’s] mood is adventure and maximalist fun — a well-traveled, collected feeling with a French, slightly nautical spirit,” Reilly says. “I like to fold in memories from our travels: a red bike from our time in Mexico City, a little ukulele from a trip to Kauai. That’s the through line, and it’s where the two halves of me meet — I’m a documentary filmmaker. I approach a room the way I approach a documentary: I’m looking for the objects that carry a story, then editing them together into one.”

One of the most sentimental objects in Leo’s room — and Reilly’s favorite part — is the cornice over the window. It came from her childhood bedroom and used to have a pink and green floral pattern. She stripped it down to the wood and reupholstered it with a fabric that she bought in Thailand when she was 16 years old. “It quietly ties my childhood to Leo’s,” she says. 

The room’s finished look has “two lives,” according to Reilly. During the day, you can find Leo busy playing on the floor, rummaging through the items on his shelves and in his baskets. At nighttime, thanks to a nebula light gifted by his godmother, the “ceiling dissolves into drifting stars and color — a dark little alley-facing room becomes the most magical place in the house.” 

Reilly says Leo is rightfully proud of his bedroom, and knows how special the space is. “When friends visit, the first thing he says is, ‘C’mon, let me give you a tour of my room!’” Reilly says. “He has real sweat equity in it, and it shows.”