A Forest, Built from Her Imagination
Isla knew how she wanted her room to feel. Our job was to work out how to get there. A fallen tree became shelving, mineral finishes softened the walls, and stencilled leaves brought the branches to life. Each decision grew from her brief, with room for experimentation and a few unexpected discoveries along the way.
It Started with the Carpet
I’d chosen a carpet for Isla while she was away. When she came home, I thought I should double-check my choice. So we went to see Les at the
Carpet Court showroom in Maroochydore to confirm the selection.
“No, Dad. No way! Not fluffy enough.”
What followed was a twenty-minute bespoke client experience, with Isla test-running the fluffiest carpets in the showroom. She knew exactly what she was looking for.
Her final choice? Pure off-white.
The carpet was settled. The rest of the room was about to become considerably more interesting.
The Brief
That night, we browsed Pinterest for ideas. Lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling, Isla began explaining what she wanted.
Butterflies and flowers overhead. Then she had something else to show me: trees in the room.
“Dad, I want nature in my room. As much nature as we can fit. I want trees, leaves. I want it to feel like a forest.”
There it was. A clear brief from a client who truly knew what she wanted.
How we were going to deliver it was my problem.
While Isla was still with us, we started on the walls: limewash on the two gyprock walls and marmorino on the two brick walls. Natural mineral finishes gave us the beginnings of the room, with softness, movement and texture.
Marmorino on left meeting Baeuwerk velvet style limewash on right.
Then Isla went to Mum’s, leaving me to work out how to put a forest in her bedroom.
Finding the Tree
An idea on Etsy gave me a starting point: a real tree, cut in half and installed against a wall, with timber shelves forming branches.
That was what I wanted to recreate. I had no idea how.
At my BNI meeting that day, I showed the idea to my colleague Lalita. She had a fallen tree on her property that I could use. Taking it away would help her, and it would give us the material we needed.
The next morning, chainsaw in hand, I went hunting.
I brought the tree home feeling fairly pleased with the idea of turning fallen timber into something useful. Then I started grinding back the bark.
Slugs. Bugs. Entire colonies of insects. Ant colonies in five different colours.
It turned out that bringing nature into the room required deciding exactly how much nature we were prepared to bring.
A Tree in the Sauna
The timber needed some de-naturing.
Our solution was the sauna.
We switched it on, packed in the tree sections and heated them for the next ten hours, well past 60 degrees. The ant colonies calmly made their exit. The other residents didn’t fare quite so well.
The following day, we finally had material we could work with.
We laid the sections out on the ground to work out how they might fit together. That gave us a starting point, but the real arrangement happened on the wall.
We installed the bottom section first. From there, the wall dictated where each piece belonged.
A trip to
Yandina Slab Warehouse supplied the live-edge timber for the shelves. We wanted them to float, which meant steel rods, careful fitting and a substantial amount of mallet banging.
Some of that happened at midnight.
Midnight was not optional. Isla’s return was getting closer.
Beautiful. But Dead.
With the trees installed, we stood back.
They looked beautiful.
They also looked dead.
We had timber, branches and shelves, but the room felt more like a desert than a forest. Isla had asked for life, leaves and nature. We hadn’t quite reached her brief.
That was when the stencil idea landed.
Behind the timber, we stencilled a silhouette of leaves in a tone slightly lighter than the marmorino. It gave the tree a kind of spirit shadow: foliage suggested on the wall behind the real branches.
Then leaves and butterflies went onto the ceiling.
The trees suddenly belonged to something living. The walls and ceiling became part of the same scene.
Now we were getting somewhere.
The Ceiling That Was Too Perfect
There was still something bothering me.
The white ceiling looked too perfect for the room.
Our apprentice had painted it twice to get it right. It was clean, even and beautifully finished. But surrounded by mineral walls and irregular timber, it needed some movement of its own.
I decided to limewash it white, bringing it into line with the character of the rest of the home.
The only limewash I could source in time was Rockcote. When I opened it, I was surprised. It felt an order of magnitude thicker than the watery limewashes I’d used before.
Alongside my BNI mate, I brushed it onto the ceiling, leaving a pronounced texture.
Then I had a thought.
What would happen if I knocked that texture down with my Bianco trowel?
It’s a specialist metal trowel that won’t leave marks on white lime. I started working over the surface, hoping to soften the brush texture.
The brush marks flattened into a beautiful pattern.
And then it burnished.
How good.
We were left with a bespoke satin sheen across the ceiling, with movement in the surface and a finish I hadn’t expected when I opened the tub.
We’d already used our velvet technique on the Bauwerk limewash walls, creating a soft, lightly blooming mineral finish. I thought that was lovely. This ceiling was something new again.
When I contacted Rockcote about the result, the response confirmed what we’d discovered:
“It polishes amazingly, but nobody knows.”
The Finishing Pieces
A new fan was stencilled to match, with LED backlighting. New magnetic lights were limewashed to blend into the room. Fairy lights were hot-glued along the tree, adding little points of light among the branches.
The cupboard was built from reclaimed hardwood from a Riviera Renovations job, combined with camphor laurel slabs.
To this day, it smells amazing.
The blinds were a gift from Phil at Laguna Bay Blinds, a thank-you for the work we’d done on his Espresso Martini Houseboat. A little piece of one project finding its way into another.
Apart from the trim, painted in Resene Lustacryl, and the carpet, every finish in the room is natural. Limewashed ceiling, limewash and marmorino walls, stencils and wood.
And underfoot, the exceptionally fluffy, off-white carpet that started it all.
A Room Built Around Her Idea
Isla’s room has been entered in the 2026 Master Painters Queensland Awards for Excellence, in the Decorative / Artistic Finish category. The judging is complete, and we’re waiting to hear the result.
The project brings together mineral finishes, stencil work, reclaimed timber and a ceiling treatment discovered along the way. There was planning, experimentation, a sauna full of tree and more than a little midnight mallet work.
But the direction came from Isla.
She rejected the first carpet. She pointed to the ceiling. She showed me the trees.
Before I knew how any of it would work, she knew how she wanted the room to feel.
“Dad, I want nature in my room.”
That was the brief.
We built from there.
