A feature wall above the bed
When asked to do the interior design of a home or residence often I love to include some kind of unique feature wall that goes above the bed in the master bedroom or guest bedroom. This allows me to get hands-on in the final stages of the construction process as it normally will need finishing by hand - and then I can take a break from the office and go back to what I love - painting and creating art.
For this project I was asked to complete just one room in an abandoned villa so the owners could sell it. My team were also engaged to clean up the entire villa but not to finish anything except the master bedroom. We shot some video and photos of me sketching in what will one day be the living room.....
For the master bedroom I designed a kind of abstract artwork based on some wood carvings that I had seen around a door frame on one visit to Chiang Mai in North Thailand. It was to be a large feature piece that was fixed into the wall above the bed. It was kind of geometric but also with floral and plantlike patterns. I first sketched it on on paper then had my team vectorize it in Adobe Illustrator for final adjustments then converted to a CAD file that could be programmed into the CNC machine at our workshop. On the CNC we etched the design into three large pieces of Birch Plywood. Im sorry I dont have any photos of how it looked as just a raw etching on bare plywood but the photo below is the nearly finished end result after painting.
Once the three pieces were glued onto a backing and hung in place I then used a metallic style paint to give it a look and feel of metal. I rolled it on giving multiple coats over several days. Here are some photos of the process....
Once I was happy with the base coat of metallic paint I switched to a fine paintbrush and started doing all the details of the etched pattern. It was a long and painstaking process and it took way longer than I had anticipated. Here are some photos of the painting process....
The last photo shows you how short I am haha. Anyway this process kept me busy for several days. I just did small sections at a time. Here are a few photos of what the room looked like before we started the renovation and construction....
And here is the final finished master bedroom. I think the feature piece above the bed turned out pretty OK. With these kind of projects it's hard to know if the end result is going to match the idea I had in my mind when I started. There's always a risk that halfway through I realize it's not going to work and I have wasted a huge amount of time and money (it's happened before). But in this case I'm very happy with it and the owners loved it and actually the villa has since been sold and the new owners are engaging me to design the rest of the Villa. I will post later about how the rest of the project comes together...:)
