Graham and Kristina Currie run too-cool-for-preschool kids’ clothing store Bon Tot, which they fitted out with cardboard shelving for £75 (check out our article on the innovative store for STYLIST magazine). So it’s no surprise their three-year-old daughter Clemence has bedroom decor most adults would kill for, and on a tiny budget. Here, Graham shares his interior design secrets with The Pink House (spoiler: IKEA hacks and lucky finds feature heavily).
PH: Did you know you were having a girl when you designed Clemence’s room?
GC: Clemence hadn’t been born when we decorated her room, but yes, we knew she was a girl. We always knew we wanted gender-neutral clothing, colours, themes etc, though, so her gender made little difference to our choice of decor. We weren't raising a little princess; we were trying to raise a strong, independent little girl.
An eclectic mix of Bon Tot clothing, gifts and handmade objects decorate Clemence's room
PH: Where did the inspiration for the grey/yellow/hot pink colour scheme come from?
GC: We did a lot of Pinterest searching, but made our final decision after playing around with a few tester pots. Being an architect, it's hard to look past grey, and we added yellow as a highlight. As for the bright pink inside the wardrobe, we thought, ‘if we’re going to give her a bit of pink then it's going to be PINK!’
The hot pink charity-shop-find wardrobe interior is a cool concession to girliness
PH: We heartily approve of hot pink! So Clemence’s room looks all ‘designer’ – was it expensive?
GC: Not at all - as with the Bon Tot shop interior, we had a teeny budget for her room, so we Farrow & Balled an Ikea cot and an Ikea chest of drawers we were given. We found a wardrobe in charity shop 4 Square on Logie Green Road, and again went for grey Farrow & Ball to the outside, with hot pink inside. We bought a set of industrial ‘garage grids’ to wall-mount behind her changing space so we could hang bits and pieces, both useful and decorative. A very good illustrator friend of ours, Verity Keniger, gave us one of her prints to hang over Clemence’s cot.
The Ikea cot is painted in Farrow & Ball's Day Room Yellow and Manor House Gray
PH: You guys seem to attract gorgeous gifts and fabulous finds – are there any more in Clemence’s room?
GC: We found the yellow chevron curtain material on Etsy, and had a family friend make them up for us. The ‘C’ was a gift from our florist friend Hedgerow and is an old butcher's shop sign salvage yard find.
The 'Clemence' wooden train was bought in Paris just before she was born
PH: The little details really make the room – where did the wooden 'Clemence' train come from?
GC: The wooden train (and the tiger and little vest hanging on the grids) is from Paris - the last trip we made before Clemence was born. I dragged Kris up to the Sacre Coeur at sunset, which she wasn't best pleased about…until she got to the top and realised how beautiful it was. There was a chap making little wooden trains on the street there, and it felt like an appropriate place to buy a named item for her room.
Clemence in her room, wearing Marmalade Sky harem pants from Bon Tot
Get The Look
- Paint colours: The main grey/deep purple wall is a Dulux colour. The grey on the wardrobe, chest of drawers and cot is Farrow & Ball Lamp Room Gray, and the yellow cot bars are Dayroom Yellow. The wall you don't see in the photos is Farrow & Ball 'Strong White'. The neon pink in the wardrobe is another Dulux mix. We got the spray paint for the grids from Edinburgh Art Shop - it's their GOLD brand spray paint.
- Alphabet storage basket: We bought 3 storage bags from Land of Nod (again from the States: http://www.landofnod.com/organic-landscape-floor-bins/f12125 ).
- Elephant bunting: Curiouser & Curiouser on Edinburgh’s Broughton Street.
