Two Wild: a safari second birthday in Horley

Amiya was turning two — and her family wanted a safari without the cliché. No primary brights, no jungle-print bunting, no cartoon zebra cake. Something soft, slightly grown-up, and properly considered. The venue was Horley Community Centre: a generous hall with tall arched windows, deep blue curtains and a parquet wood floor. Beautiful bones, very little atmosphere.

This is a quick walk-through of how the day came together — from the two render boards we signed off in March, through to install morning at the hall.

Two renders, one room

For a celebration with a single hero installation — a backdrop in a corner of a living room, say — one concept render is usually enough. For Amiya's setup we needed two: one for the feature backdrop on the long wall, and a second for the twelve-seat banquet table running through the middle of the hall. They had to read as the same celebration without the table being a smaller copy of the wall.

The render is deliberately illustrative rather than photo-real. I want the family to be able to read it in seconds: the panel shape, the marquee "2", the safari character cut-outs, where the balloon clusters sit and crucially the colour palette. Dusty pink, peach, sage, soft lilac, butter gold and cream. Everything that came after — the latex finishes, the cardboard cut-out tones, the moss on the bases, even the gold of the cutlery — was chosen to sit inside that palette.

Designing for a long table

The table was the bit that needed the most thought. Twelve seats, white chiavari chairs, a long unbroken run — beautiful to look at empty, easy to leave looking sparse if you don't dress it properly.

Three things did the heavy lifting. A foliage runner with real ivy and pale pink garden roses threaded through it, so the table read as alive rather than decorated. A pair of plush safari soft toys — a baby elephant and a giraffe — propped into the runner as centrepieces, picking up the safari brief without a single piece of bunting. And balloon clusters integrated along the table itself, not floating above it, so the eye reads the table and the backdrop as one continuous installation.

Place settings stayed quiet on purpose: pink scallop-edge plates, a soft zebra-print salad plate on top as the only pattern on the table, brushed gold cutlery and a pink tumbler. Pattern earns its place when the rest of the surface is calm.

Sourcing and sampling

Once both renders were signed off, the next three weeks were sourcing. The personalised "Amiya" panel and the safari character cut-outs (giraffe, lion cub, elephant, peeking zebra) were drawn and printed in-studio so the tones matched the palette exactly — off-the-shelf safari prints almost always skew too saturated.

The marquee "2" is a hire piece, but the bulbs were swapped to a warmer pink to sit inside the palette rather than fight it. Greenery is a mix of preserved and faux — preserved on the topiary letters and runner because it photographs well, faux underneath because it has to survive the install, the day and the teardown.

Balloons are last and built on site. Latex is biodegradable, mixed sizes and finishes (matte pastel, soft chrome gold, deeper sage) so the garland and the table clusters read as organic rather than rhythmic. Every balloon goes up by hand on install morning.

Delivery day at Horley Community Centre

Install on a setup of this scale runs about six hours with two of us on site. The greenery wall and the personalised panel go up first because everything else is composed around them. Then the marquee "2" is wheeled into position and the topiary "Two Wild" letters are nestled into the wall greenery.

The safari character cut-outs go in next — the giraffe tall on one side leading the eye up, the elephant low and forward, the zebra peeking out from behind the panel. The table is dressed last: foliage runner first, then the soft-toy centrepieces, then the plates and cutlery, then the integrated balloon clusters wired into the runner so they don't drift over the course of the day.

I always do a final ten-minute walk around before the family comes in. That's the part the render can't quite predict — how the natural light from the arched windows is hitting the panel, whether one balloon needs to come down a few inches, whether the foliage on the table wants pulling forward to soften an edge. By the time the door opens, the room is doing what both sketches promised it would.

Why I love this part

A community hall is the test case for this work. There's no pretty kitchen island or beautiful garden to lean on — whatever atmosphere the room ends up with, you've brought it with you. That makes the upfront design honest. If the renders aren't right, the room won't be either.

Amiya's "Two Wild" is a good one to talk through because the two renders and the finished room read as the same image. That only happens when the design work has been honest about scale, sightlines and what the venue can actually hold.

If you're planning a second birthday — or a tenth, or a first — and you'd love something designed from the ground up around your child rather than picked from a package, tell me what you have in mind. The first sketch is always free.

— Laura