ROOM WE LOVE: Color Me Happy

Kelly Hickman, principal designer at ES Design Studio, gets a lot of requests for understated, neutral interiors. So she was thrilled when the owners of a 12,800-square-foot home in Morrocroft wanted a color-blitzed bonus room for their two children. “The goal was to make the playroom cool, interactive, and full of really fun stuff so it didn’t look like a ‘kids room’, but something they could grow into,” she says. “They told us, ‘Anything but neutral.’ The only thing they said they wanted was the curved pod chairs. With everything else, we were given carte blanche.”

JUST ADD PIGMENT

Prior to the renovation, the homeowners had been using the 28×20 room to store furniture from a previous house. Hickman dialed up the blank white walls with a mix of faux boxwood, wallpaper, and a spray painted mural. “We started with just one side and put up plywood, painted it kelly green, then, with a staple gun, we put boxwood panels on it and added butterflies for a 3D effect,” she says. “Then we did it on the other side with neon signs and floating artwork for a bit of continuity but also something completely different.” Hickman selected a navy patterned wallpaper from Thibaut for the third wall and hired a local artist to do hand painted murals with spray paint and gold foil on the fourth.

SHINE BRIGHT

Inside the three dormers, Hickman created cozy reading nooks with hot pink upholstered cushions and chevron-patterned Roman shades. She painted the built-in shelves cobalt blue to complement the wallpaper and anchored the space with a blue and white dotted rug from Stanton. “It took seven people to carry the custom-made rug in,” Hickman says. Between the dormers, she installed gold floating shelves from Revelation and added a Regina Andrews chandelier for another pop of gold. “The floors weren’t our favorite color,” she says, “so we pulled in some gold to work with those yellow and orange tones.” 

COLOR CASCADE

Hickman furnished the room with pod chairs from RH and a modular sectional from Four Hands. “We went with a neutral because the walls are so bright,” she says, “and it’s a crypton fabric, which is forgiving with kids.” The ottoman, custom made by CR Laine, is upholstered in candy apple green leather. The circular table and clear acrylic chairs came from CB2 and the white media console with brass shell handles is StyleCraft. 

MAKE IT POP

To make the room “a cool place to have friends over,” Hickman added a Pac-Man arcade machine and an air hockey table. She found the Rubik’s cube wall art on Etsy and had the “Good Vibes Only” neon sign custom made; the rest she found on Google. The accent pillows are a mix of “fun colors and fuzzies” and the artwork has simple acrylic frames so it doesn’t compete with the boxwood panels. “There are dots, stripes, chevron…there’s a lot going on, but the patterns all work well together,” Hickman says. “For most rooms, you have a single focal point, but when a room is this big, you have to give your eye a lot of different walls to look at. The sky was the limit with color. Everybody likes neutrals, but with this space, it was, ‘How can we work in as much color as possible?’”