A Better Way To Play
Little Muriel are the creators of big, beautiful, graphic, play products for children. Designed to inspire open-ended play, our timeless, gender neutral designs are alive with colour and dimension. We are a boutique design company with a feel-good focus, based in the beautiful Blue Mountains on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia.
At Little Muriel, we celebrate the magic in making childhood memories. We design from a child’s point of view and take the time to see the world through their eyes. We believe that children’s design should be both joyful and timeless. Rather than follow adult trends, we take our inspiration from classic childhood stories and picture books. Children are natural storytellers, and our goal is to provide an immersive backdrop that sparks imaginative play. Our designs can be adapted to suit any situation, giving children the opportunity to become characters in their own story.
Little Muriel’s artwork is created using a Photoshop technique known as photo composite. We re-purpose, reshape and re-colour photos of found objects to create a uniquely silly type of “photo-sandwich”. This technique has enabled us to created a world where hats become mushrooms and undies become plants - adding an extra layer of magic to the play experience. By combining visual humour with a gender neutral colour palette we’ve created a timeless, retro inspired aesthetic that appeals to both adults and children.
About the Creator
Little Muriel is the creation of interior and graphic designer Jane Carr.
Jane has been designing for over 25 years and her career has been a long and varied one. To date, her clients include Stockland, AMP, Mirvac, Westfield, Service NSW and the universities of Sydney and Wollongong. From corporate office signage and murals to redesigning foodcourts for Universities, there was one type of project alway captured her imagination - working with, and for, children.
Her first playscape was a modest table top graphic for a children’s play area in a foodcourt but it was there that she fell in love with designing play experiences. Since then she has worked on a range of interactive play scapes and children’s murals.
“Children, literally, have a different perspective”, she says.
“Where adults see a simple tabletop, children are peaking through a forest of chair legs. They enjoy an unbridled imagination,
confidence, joy and kindness that adults can only sit back and admire. Our goal is simply to provide an immersive, engaging
backdrop to help nurture that”.
Planet Friendly
Bring your things!
Our kids have a lot of stuff - literally tons of plastic stuff, that will eventually end up in landfill. Our goal is to create colourful play spaces that encourage imaginative play using as little plastic as possible. We want families to use what they already have around the home as props for storytelling.
We have designed a range of interchangeable play backdrops suitable for a range of storytelling. Create your own Teddy bear Picnic just by adding a teddy and blanket to the Little Daisy Lane Decal set. Alternatively, add few cups and plates to create a kids Cafe in the Little Yellow Kitchen.
We use paper products wherever possible. At the moment, our decals are printed on to Phototex which is a Polyester textile based product. Whilst not recyclable, it does “scrunch” to a small handful of waste which we believe is adds less to landfill than large plastic playhouses. We will alway search out the best products available to create our prints.
We print on demand digitally rather than have large offset print runs in storage. While this is not the most cost effective way to produce our products, we can avoid excess stock go to landfill.
Australian Made
We are proudly made in Australia. We love our printers and have worked with them for almost a decade. We know they will always take the required time to make sure our prints look perfect. We know they really care for their staff and will apply best practice principles in the factory.