Where the Wild Things Roam — Nursery Map

Not every commission is a real place — this nursery map illustrates an invented island the clients had been telling their older child bedtime stories about for a year, with named coves, a lighthouse, and a mountain the family had already given a name in their own storytelling before the studio was ever involved.

While the geography here is imaginative rather than surveyed, the commission process itself was treated with the same rigor as any real-place map: the studio measured the actual nursery wall and framed opening before drawing a single line, so the finished piece fits its intended space exactly rather than being scaled down from a generic print size after the fact.

The island’s coastline, oddly enough, still needed to look like a real coastline to read convincingly at a glance — so it was drawn with reference to genuine coastal geomorphology (real headlands, real inlet shapes) even though the place itself doesn’t exist.