Last time, we decorated Mila’s room in our holiday home in France, was shortly after we purchased the house and refurbished it at the speed of the light to rent it over Summer. Mila was two years old.

We fitted a sisal carpet on the floor to hide the uneven concrete floor, painted the walls in white and added two single beds as the house is rented out to other families during the summer and caters for 8 people + a baby.
If you click on the second image here when the house was featured in Boligdrom magazine in 2014 and Grand Designs in 2008, you will see that we turned the front and back of a vintage French iron bed into two headboards for every single bed.

Fast forward 10 years, Mila is now a 12-year-old pre-teen, well into surfing, skating and all of the above is gone.

Her room in 2008 (shot by Grand Designs) Vs 2016 after taking the sisal off

Her room is still in need of a serious makeover and I’m planning at some point, to paint one of her walls in light grey, get her a new bedside table and a new bed. However, this week I have focused on decluttering her desk area to make sure it feels like a happy place and encourages her to do her homework there rather than bringing her mess into the lounge.

Mila’s requirements:

In addition to using the vintage desk my sister gave her, Mila wanted to have a bedroom that would reflect her passion for surfing with a palette of soft/vintage pink, pale green, light grey and white.
She was also keen to have a gallery wall with cactus & palm trees as we had seen in Nüde, a nice café in Canggu where we went a few times for lunch during our recent trip to Bali.

With this in mind, I put this mood board together to get a feel for the look we wanted to achieve.

Selecting the prints:

The gallery wall was key as Mila wanted something nice to look at when we walked into her room and something inspiring. So we went on Juniqe to select a few prints for her bedroom.

Selecting the prints for Mila’s gallery wall was fun and tricky at the same time as Juniqe has a huge selection of 6,000 cool prints and represents over 600 international artists so plenty of choice for everyone. They also have some fun & colourful shower curtains and cushions but I tried to not be carried away…

Rather than going through thousands of prints, I narrowed down my search by using relevant keywords like the palm tree, cactus, surf, surfing, beach, California etc…

In doing this, I came across some really nice black & white prints… Cali Palms, Palm Leaves 1,  Note to Self or B&W Lines are some of the few that caught my eye.

The great thing about this site is that you can order the print of your choice as poster, canvas or framed in a black or white picture frame.

“Being able to order already framed pictures, no matter the size is a major time saver in my book!”

If it had been me, I would have gone for a monochrome gallery wall but I had to back off and let my young client decides what she wanted for her bedroom. So I make a pre-selection of about 20 prints which I like and that would meet Mila’s requirements for colours, style and design and added them to the wishlist on the Juniqe website.

To make the selection process a bit easier, I copy (right-click) the image directly from the Juniqe website and paste them into Photoshop to see how they look like against each other (see below).

You can do the same in Word and drag the corner down to reduce the size of the image or if you are not computer literate, just print them at 50% and place them on your desk to see them all together.

Then Mila and I went over the list again and narrowed it down to the top 5 ones she really liked. Her favourite ones being GRL and Bot Gardens, I ordered them in a large size (41 x 61 cm) and framed to make my life easier and the other 3 prints in 21 x 31 cm.

“It doesn’t have to be perfect to look nice”

Putting the look together

Having taken the sisal carpet off the floor last year to replace it with a painted concrete floor, I started by clearing her shelves and walls from all the clutter to work with a blank canvas.
I don’t like drilling into a brick wall (or commit to make any holes), so I used Command Brand’s picture hanging strips which allow you to hang small & large picture frames without damaging your walls (provided they are painted and not wallpapered). They are so easy to use that your teen can do it…Initially, I had planned to hang 5 picture frames above her desk, but Mila decided she wanted the small Pink Cactus by her bed. Since there are two wall-mounted shelves on the left-hand side of the wall, it turned out to be tricky to add the large Bot Gardens print to the gallery wall so we left it for now until we find a proper space for it.    And here is the final result…

BEFORE & AFTER: From a cluttered desk to a soft & soothing desk & bedroom

Do you fancy doing the same and 10% OFF your next set of prints?

I hope you like the result and I’m delighted to announce you that, in collaboration with Juniqe, I can offer all my readers 10% OFF on your order with the promo code: BODIEANDFOU. The offer will expire on 20/09/2017.

Shopping list:

Vintage desk: gifted by my sister
Prints from Juniqe (from left to right clockwise): GRL | Rose Palm Leaves | Bot Gardens | Pink Cactus | Desert House
Seagrass rug: from Ebay but find Next has a nice round jute rug
Natural wooden ladder from Smallable
Wooden stool from Smallable
LACK Wall mounted shelves from Ikea
Pink bed linen from Piglet in Bed

Posted in partnership with Juniqe; all views my own. Thank you for supporting the brands that help support BODIE and FOU