This mom and son duo had such wonderful energy — playful, open, imaginative. And the mural had to match.
The story of how this project came to be is one of my favourites. The mom’s brother had a whole room mural painted years ago — and she had always dreamed of having the same thing done for her son one day. The only thing standing between that dream and reality was finding the right person to do it. When she heard about me, she reached out. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Their brief was beautifully open. No rigid theme, no specific characters — just a playful design that would inspire storytelling and help their son drift off to sweet dreams every night. Exactly the kind of brief I love most.
My approach to whimsical kids’ room murals has always been rooted in the same principles: open-ended elements that invite imagination rather than closing it down. Unconventional use of perspective. Unexpected colour relationships. Landscapes that raise questions rather than answer them — because a child who asks “but where does that path go?” is a child whose imagination is already running. I believe deeply that the unusual and the creative deserve a place in our everyday lives, especially when children are involved. It’s how we foster new ways of thinking, curiosity, and wonder.
The room had bulkhead ceilings that another designer might have worked around. I worked with them instead — using them as natural frames for different elements of the scene, breaking the composition across levels in a way that gave the whole hand-painted mural an almost three-dimensional quality.
The geometric countryside scene is deliberately full of beautiful ambiguity. Birds fly and perch among trees that have just enough leaves to leave you wondering — early spring, or late autumn? The bold yellow sky hints at a sunny day, but a moon sits quietly in the corner — so is it morning, or is it dusk? And swimming through the lake, a school of unusually shaped fish hints at all the possibilities and variations that surround us, if only we look closely enough. The whole scene exists in a light that feels neither quite day nor quite night — that dreamy in-between hour that belongs entirely to children.
The installation was finished. And then the real magic happened.
What had been planned as a bedhead mural — the wall behind the bed — suddenly didn’t feel right anymore. Not to the boy. He wanted to fall asleep facing it. He wanted to lie in bed and look at his countryside before closing his eyes. And he wanted his friends to be able to walk right up to it, get close, and explore every detail.
So the whole room layout was rearranged. The bed moved to face the mural. The boy got exactly what he wanted.
There is no client feedback that means more to me than a child rearranging his bedroom furniture to be closer to something I painted. That is the whole point.