A vibrant trio of pink, green and orange, with circus-themed stripes and a fox print, gave Angela Clarke’s eldest child the lively, bright room she wanted
Feature Jane Crittenden Styling Alison Gibb Photos Douglas Gibb
Angela Clarke has loved crafting and being creative with interiors since she was a child, and remembers the pleasure of decorating her dolls house and choosing her own bedroom décor. So, she wanted her children to create the same memories. ‘When we moved into this all-white house, it was really important for me to decorate fun and inspiring rooms for the kids to give them good memories and encourage their own creativity,’ she says.
THE PROJECT
The early 2000s house has an unusual upside-down layout (prompting Angela’s Instagram, @the_upside_down_house) where three of the bedrooms are on the ground floor. The couple chose the one at the back for Olive, looking onto the garden. She was six months old when they moved in.
‘The room was the second biggest and fairly square, with a double bed, so it was a good size,’ Angela recalls. ‘But it was entirely white – even the carpet – and there were built-in wardrobes with mirrored doors that weren’t to my taste.’ The couple decided keeping the practical storage outweighed the aesthetics. Instead, they redirected the attention onto the playful Scion Living Little Fox wallpaper that’s seen as soon as you come into the room.
WHAT WE DID
Fast forward eight years, and Olive wanted to revamp her room in a colour scheme of pinks and greens. ‘We already had orange in the wallpaper and Olive was keen for a stripey wall,’ says Angela. ‘Since I’ve used the same three colours elsewhere in the house, I looked at what paint we had leftover in the garage.’
Angela discovered they still had plenty of Lick’s Green 05 after painting the playroom and used this to decorate the largest area in the room – the ceiling and above the new picture rail, which Stuart fitted. ‘The pink stripes are in Crown’s Satin Lining, which we’d used to paint Iris’s ceiling,’ says Angela. ‘The orange was the colour of our bathroom before we recently repainted it and is more of a peachy-tangerine. It’s not the same tone as the wallpaper, which is what happens when you use up
