Preschool classrooms {part 1}

Today was my second day hanging art and placing furniture in the pediatric clinic. It is moving slower than I had thought. There is a lot of furniture to put together and you know how Ikea stuff is - sometimes it goes together well and then sometimes there are missing parts and confusing directions. The guys are doing a great job but it is just taking a long time. The office is not finished so think of this more as a sneak preview!

Let me give you a little background. The client is a pediatric neurologist who specializes in the treatment of children with autism. This office will house three preschool classrooms, two speech pathologist offices and three psychology offices in addition to an office for the principal doctor who is my client. There are 15 rooms altogether. Three pre-school classrooms, 6 offices for the various doctors, a conference room, kitchen, restroom, manager's office and the waiting room and reception area. When we started, the space was a large empty box.

This is the doctor's first office and she asked for a modern space with a slight Asian feel. She really loved the artwork from Ashes and Snow and asked for some of that artwork to be placed in the office. The other criteria was that the office space be somewhat minimal (not a lot of things the children could get into) and not too much color and pattern in the classrooms to keep the children from being distracted. From the beginning I was very sensitive to the fact that this was a space for children but also for their parents and I wanted it to feel like breath of fresh air to the parents and a place where they would feel hope and be encouraged.

Ashes and Snow {via}

This was a large project for me and a challenge since I design primarily residential spaces so I decided to start with the classrooms (seemed the most fun!). My inspiration came from decals that I found on Esty. Initially the client had expressed a desire for three rooms to have a marine theme. While I was searching for ideas with an ocean / marine theme, I found so many other cute ideas that were not ocean related that it just evolved from there. We settled on a marine room, a safari room and a forest room. Because the rooms were small, the budget limited and we needed the stimulus to be fairly minimal, I used decals primarily for the artwork in the classrooms. And while each classroom is painted a different color, I used the color teal in each room to tie them all together.

The marine room:

My sister helped me with the artwork for the door signs. We used the decals from each room as our inspiration.

I oredered custom rugs from FLOR, and am still waiting for the rest of the furniture to be put together but it is a good start.

The Safari Room:

This is my favorite room. In fact, the giraffe decal was what got me hooked on the idea of using decals in the first place and also convinced me that we needed to branch out from the all marine themed rooms.

Each classroom is equipped with a 2-way mirror and audio for parents to view the teachers working with their children. 

The Forest Room:

When I was searching for decals I was impressed by the variety that was available. I was touched by some of the quotes and wanted to add some encouragement for the parents.

But my favorite decals were the large birch tree trunks that I put in the waiting room. They turned out phenomenal. 

Come back tomorrow and I will share what I did in the conference room, kitchen and restroom.