I've always found my boys bedrooms difficult to decorate. Don't get me wrong, I'm a relentless interior design enthusiast, I love solving design dilemmas and I'm definitely not stuck for ideas. The main reason is because I really want their personalities to shine through and this makes things a little trickier. A room of ones own is a special place and I don't want my quiet, calm, neutral style - the style of the rest of our home - to muscle in on their space if that's not right for them.
Of course I can scroll through Pinterest for ideas, create some mood boards and put a very nice look together, but a room like this will never deliver exactly what I want for them. Their room needs to be inspirational for their growing minds, it should encourage their creativity, I want this space to feel personal and unique. What I don't want is for this very important place to be a copy of a typical boys bedroom, which makes ticking all of those boxes tough.
This Summer I found myself itching to finish my eldest's bedroom, an interior design project I started quite a while ago. When it comes to interior design I often pick a subtle theme for each room and in Ross's bedroom the style was 'American'. There were quite a few reasons for this, but my favourite was Casey Neistat - the driven, genuine, charismatic YouTuber. He loves watching Casey's daily vlog with us in the evenings and seeing him zip through bustling New York city on his boosted board as he goes about his day.
That was the inspiration, and I had finally almost gotten to the end of the project and was really happy with everything apart from one wall. It was the biggest uninterrupted wall in the room and needed something great. I had tried out a few ideas there but none of them looked right - big posters in bright red frames, a gallery wall of quotes with pictures of people he admired. But nothing was working and I was getting frustrated, I just couldn't come up with anything fitting for the last most important piece of the puzzle.
Then one day out of the blue David thought of a perfect solution to personalise and inspire. A decal on the wall of the New York skyline with inspiring quotes written on the buildings and Ross and his brothers hidden among them. It ticked every single box and David started working on an amazing skyline shot of the city.
It was delivered last week in a big cardboard tube and as soon as we unrolled it I knew that David's idea was going to be perfect and look brilliant in the space.
