REAL-LIFE LONDON: Easton, Quin & Ivy’s rooms

Photographs: Light Locations & Courtney Adamo.

WHEN Courtney Adamo - one of the bloggers behind Babyccino Kids - bought and renovated her home in north London last year, making the interior perfect was the last thing on her mind. Luckily for Courtney, she had a host of friends willing to give away furniture to help her complete the project. The result is beautiful and calm - although Courtney claims, “my husband and I always say that seeing photos of our house makes us realise how boring it is!!! It needs serious help in the design department, but after renovating the whole thing last year, we’re taking a break from spending.”

Courtney isn’t so critical of her kids’ rooms, even though they too have mostly happened rather than being planned. For example, she says two-year-old Ivy’s room, pictured above and below right, is “a bit of a hodge-podge of random things that ended up in there when we were moving in. We placed that Ercol chair in her room for lack of a better place at the time, but I liked it so much in there we never moved it. Same goes for the lamp in the corner, the storage boxes at the foot of her bed, and some of the art on the fireplace mantle.” Read the rest of this article

Posted 31 October 2011 in Real Life Interiors

REAL LIFE, VENICE, CALIFORNIA: Jesse’s home

JOHN TRIPP, FATHER to Jesse, 3, and Sam, 14 months, leads something of a double life. By night he’s a DJ, playing the Standard Hotel in Hollywood, as well as at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery Screenings. By day he runs Jesse’s Threads, a vintage kids’ clothing store full of the kind of original 70s threads you and I used to wear back in the day (www.jessesthreads.com).

John’s home is equally retro, and is imbued with as many stories as the clothes he sells. The 1905 Craftsman house he shares with his actress wife, Tina Holmes, and the two boys is full of “furniture we found at flea markets, auctions, on the street, and from our families.” Luckily John and Tina’s families have impeccable taste. Read the rest of this article

Posted 12 May 2011 in Real Life Interiors

REAL LIFE LONDON: Ava & Jonah’s room

AVA AND JONAH’S MUM Jennifer Robertson - co-owner of Scamp Baby Gifts with her sister Stacey - wouldn’t have chosen to put the two of them in the same room.

But space in her two-bed Camden Georgian townhouse only 15 minutes walk from Regent’s Park and the zoo dictated otherwise. Now she’s pleased she did. “They love sharing,” she says of five-year-old Ava and three-year-old Jonah, “and I really feel they would have missed out on a lot of fun together in different rooms. A lot of mornings I hear giggling and laughing as the two of them wake up and go straight into the dressing-up box to start some kind of story telling adventure at 7am.”

The room itself is a reflection of the kids’ creativity and that of their mother’s, and her friends and neighbours. Ava came up with the idea of the home-made bunting (pictured left, on the shelves) made from a collection of old paper napkins, and the papier mache ladybird (see a close-up below) was a nursery project. There’s even a little love letter written to her younger brother. Jennifer made the picture of Ava’s first pair of baby shoes, and the collage on the wall was made from a selection of Ella Doran images. Her friend the children’s book illustrator Sam Childs created the Noah’s Ark painting (the cover of a recent book) - signed specially for Jonah - and another friend Leah Halliday made the Ava doll (far left). “It’s all pretty personal,” says Jennifer. “The Little Miss Japan and Robot pictures were prototypes for some of the personalised pictures we now sell on the Scamp Baby Gifts website, so Ava and Jonah were the first ever owners of those designs.” Read the rest of this article

Posted 7 April 2011 in Real Life Interiors

REAL LIFE SINGAPORE: Vera’s Room

SIXTEEN MONTH OLD Vera is the second daughter of Singapore-based art director Roy Poh, whose graphic design studio is called A Beautiful Design. Roy works from home - a three-storey house in the eastern part of Singapore near the beach: “surrounded by quaint two-storey shophouses occupied by mostly cafes and restaurants” and far away from the city’s high rises - so he can look after eight-year-old Kyra and year old Vera, whose room is a treasure trove of finds that betrays Roy’s “passion for art, toys, collectibles, books, typography and all things quirky.”

“My girls shares my collections since I use these items to decorate their rooms,” explains Roy, a founding member of Singapore’s Design Society. “For most of the collectibles I bought I like to spray paint them either white, black or sometimes luminous colors. Once I bought the kids a pair of brown rabbits (made of clay) and the next day Kyra was puzzled as to why they’d turned white. I told her they’d had a scare and all the brown fur dropped off… Of course she knew I was kidding….”

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Posted 4 February 2011 in Real Life Interiors

INTERIOR DESIGNERS: Wary Meyers

ONE OF OUR FAVOURITE blogs is the beautiful, retro-themed Wary Meyers, penned by artist and interior designer John Meyers. Based in Maine, John and his wife Linda create beautiful, original interiors and soft furnishings under the name Wary Meyers Decorative Arts. Previously Linda was a graphic designer in New York, and John was Corporate Display Director for Anthropologie. They live with Fletcher, pictured above, their almost toddler.

John took the time to answer a few questions for us and show us his son Fletcher’s room and his best buys for the same.

LittleBig: You’ve designed for children in the past - what’s been your favourite child’s project to date?

John Meyers: The first thing we really designed for a kid - or actually two kids - was the bunk bed for a friend of ours [see gallery, bottom]. It was influenced by architecture’s International Style, having basically two plain white slabs and a minimalist guardrail, with a nod to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in the ladder’s design, which spells out “BUNKBED” in big wooden type. Shifted 90 degrees the letters can be easily climbed as their stems are then all parallel. The whole room was pretty fun- we painted very faint clouds on the walls and ceiling (an idea from Sir Terence Conran’s 1975 House Book); the curtains were made from a really nice blue and red Finnish fabric, from the 60’s or 70’s, there were two big old Brian Wildsmith posters on the walls, and a giant blue and green Danish Rya rug. Read the rest of this article

Posted 28 January 2011 in Lifestyle + Interiors, Real Life Interiors