“Dreary and Sad”: 67 Handpainted Stripes Bring Joy to a Child’s Room
When she was designing her 4-year-old son Wilfie’s bedroom, Kate Sandhu received “a very clear brief” from him, she says: “Tractors, diggers, cars, rainbows and unicorns.” Besides the unicorns, Kate thought his list sounded a whole lot like a description of the family’s rural farming community.
“I wanted to combine all of his favorite things and reflect our countryside home without being too obvious about it,” Kate explains. “I also wanted to give him all of the fun and joyous things that children love, while making sure it still looked fab — but I didn’t want to compromise on his enjoyment of the room over style, because [it was] his one ‘own’ space in the house, [and] I wanted it to feel like him.”
The original room didn’t represent Wilfie. The bedroom’s design details had been around since when the previous owner’s now-grown son was 16. Not to mention, Kate and her family had installed heating, insulation, and plastering, so it was almost as if Wilfie was living in a “building site.” Essentially, “it was dreary and sad,” Kate says.
But it wouldn’t be that way for much longer. To start, Kate dreamed up building an indoor treehouse in the room with a bed underneath. The lofted area, which is a 9-ish-foot wide space that has a chalk wall inside, gives Wilfie a fun place to play.
Painting provided a set of challenges. At first, Kate wanted to create an homage to the countryside by painting rolling hills adorned with tractors and diggers. She started by covering the room in Little Greene’s Celestial Blue and then hand-drew the hills onto the wall. Something was holding her back, though.
“I paused painting as we went on holiday, and the whole way there I was thinking about how it just wasn’t working,” Kate admits. So, when they got back from vacation, she revisited an idea that initially she thought sounded too hard: stripes.
Kate left one wall with the original design as a nod to their surroundings, but on the other walls, she “painstakingly” drew 67 stripes on the walls with a pencil, then filled them in with Little Greene’s Air Force Blue. Lastly, she painted the treehouse to look like wood with Little Greene’s Scullery.
The room took around 10 full days total to complete, and Wilfie helped throughout the process. Although the stripes required a lot of time and energy, Kate thinks they were worth it in the end. Most importantly, Wilfie loves the space, too.
“Mostly, I love how much joy it brings to Wilfie,” Kate says. “His friends love playing in it; I nailed everything he asked for, aside from unicorns, and he takes anyone that comes over to see his room so that he can show it off to them.”