Fantasy Rooms -- In A Muralist's Hands A Home Can Become A Work Of Live-In Art

TYPICALLY it's a child's room that receives the mural treatment with Sesame Street or Snow White motifs in big, bright primary colors. Artist Terrell Lozada has created her share of cowboy, baseball and galaxy themes for youngsters' rooms. Lately, though, her adult clients have been venturing into more fanciful territory, steering away from standard wallpaperlike borders.

For one home, the 36-year-old painter and sculptor replicated the geometric Native American pattern on the game-room walls of the historic Stimson-Green mansion on Seattle's First Hill. She paints garden scenes and creatures both lifelike and imaginative. In a Mount Baker home, she has created a detailed jungle abounding with life in one place, a cruise-ship panorama that plays with space and perspective in another.

A self-taught artist, Lozada has worked in mediums from furniture to flatware, plumbing old, original texts to learn classical techniques, including Renaissance gilding, and immerse herself in classical design.

Stephanie and Steve Rostadt's home in Issaquah and the high, coved ceiling in its unusual octagonal living room gave Lozada an opportunity to paint in the style of her favorite period - 18th-century French. The home is surrounded by extensive manicured formal gardens and filled with antique furnishings. "We'd envisioned a pastoral landscape with hills and sheep," Stephanie Rostadt said. "But it's a good thing we gave Terrell carte blanche or we would have missed out on the greatest treasure."

On one of four panels above the room's wall molding, an elegant birdcage, representing the home, opens as if releasing birds that hover on the other panels. Lozada asked the Rostadt's children to choose their favorite birds from her books and wound up with a hummingbird, a Western wood peewee and the Bluebird of Happiness, from their 8-year-old daughter's favorite Shirley Temple film.

The imagery is meaningful to the family, respects the elegance of the home and is authentic to the time period - all representative of how, in her murals, Lozada tries to synthesize a client's tastes, architecture and furnishings with her own artistic instincts and research.

In another home, when interior designer Carleen Cafferty called on Lozada to paint a bucolic frieze of pear branches, blossoms and bumblebees running below a ceiling, the artist thought the job would be a breeze, especially with her bent for painting flora and fauna. The clients, Fiona and Graham Astor, custom-built their Jacobean manor in Carnation in a traditional English style. However, a large awkward room adjacent to the kitchen, originally planned as a casual eating area, didn't come out quite right, so Cafferty thought a border would visually lower the ceiling and make the space cozier.

Although the house is an imposing 6,200 square feet, the couple's sense of whimsy shows up in touches such as giant garden dinosaurs and a collection of dragons, including a pair on the door handles to the media room.

The bumblebees in Cafferty's original concept were the first to get the whimsical treatment.

"Fiona has this thing about pigs, so we changed the bees to flying pigs," Lozada said. Then on the first day of the job, Graham declared he wanted dragons, too. The challenge was balancing Cafferty's classic concept with the curious requests of the homeowners.

Lozada's solution was to disguise the dragons. Along the seemingly traditional English country-style frieze, with details of leaves delicately falling down the walls, a dragon is camouflaged as a pear, sleeping and hanging by its tail. Another scaly green pear-dragon unfurls its wings as it eyes a cute winged piglet.

Terrell is one of a handful of painters with whom Cafferty contracts. Though the Yellow Pages list muralists, Lozada and many others don't advertise commercially and rely on referrals by clients or through the Northwest Society of Interior Designers. The Rose Bank showroom in the Seattle Design Center displays a mural by Lozada.

Cafferty counsels clients considering mural painting to review artist portfolios carefully for suitable artistic styles and to interview for working compatibility, as well, since a muralist practically lives in the home during a job.

Lozada's flexibility, from traditional period work to turn-of-the-century Americana, is highly visible in various rooms she painted for Colleen and John Purrier's 1920s home in Mount Baker.

The first job was a Hopalong Cassidy-style playroom for their son, but she's since painted seven other rooms in the couple's residence, including banners with romantic quotations in the master bedroom, wedding-day images on the dressing-room doors and mermaids in the laundry room. The dining room has been dramatically transformed into a ship's deck and the breakfast nook and sunroom into a jungle conservatory.

"If a wall stays still long enough, I'll have it painted," laughs Colleen Purrier, who has successfully attained her goal of no white walls. Only the entry, halls and living room are undone - so far.

"It's a fairly inexpensive way to decorate," she notes.

Lozada's bids for painting are based on a day rate for the time she estimates she will need, with materials included. Since it usually takes her five days to paint a wall, a room can require a full month to complete. In general, muralists' bids will vary with experience and reputation, and could be based on square footage or work time.

Here is how Lozada describes her work in the Purrier home:

"Colleen gives me a list of words and I make it a paragraph."

An example is the cruise-ship mural. Taking all the elements into account resulted in the ocean-liner concept, combining suggested interior and exterior details such as a skyline, an airplane, a woman gazing into a mirror above the credenza, another staring back at New York City, her dance card at her feet with Lozada's signature, and a table setting with a reservation card for the Purrier party.

Viewed from the dining-room table, the ship's pianist seems to wrap seamlessly around a corner while a couple (in John's grandparents' likeness) dance on the ballroom floor in the distance. Dealing cleverly with perspective, Lozada draws straight lines continuing around walls and passing through ceiling junctures.

When Lozada painted the Purriers' breakfast room as a jungle greenhouse, Colleen liked the mural so much, she commissioned the tropics to continue into the adjoining family room.

The Purriers' unusual Hawaiian hula-lamp collection from the 1940s originally inspired the jungle theme. Lozada filled the Polynesian paradise with furry creatures, monkeys and lemurs, snails the family's cats try to catch, ants that carry leaves over doorways, macaws flying through palms across the ceiling, parrots perching on window frames and orchids in bloom. The bugs seem to buzz, the snakes hiss and the air feel almost humid.

"Murals change the atmosphere of a room," says Lozada. "People say they don't want to leave." There are details to discover while living with her murals. With the ship-scape, Colleen feels as if the people on the walls have become part of her extended family.

In addition to large public rooms, murals are effective for small spaces such as bathrooms where there are limited decorating options.

For the Purriers, Lozada painted an aquatic bathroom where clouds and gulls float up the wall and crawdads crawl from under a clawfoot tub covered with a school of fish and sea creatures.

Lozada calls it "the height of luxury to paint private spaces." Although decorating often focuses on entertainment rooms, "it makes as much sense to paint a bathroom or laundry room since we spend time in them."

An irony for muralists is that their art is both highly permanent and highly vulnerable. The owner can't move the art - "there's a level of commitment to painting a wall," Lozada says - but tastes and owners can change.

"Since it's not portable, the only way to remove it is to paint over it," she says. "I've accepted that."

Lozada's first mural, in the Loveless Building on Capitol Hill, originally was for an inviting reception room at a spa. Now her giant water lilies adorn a storage room.

Ultimately, she thinks, painting murals comes from the same impulse as graffiti or a child's scribblings in crayon. "A big blank space begs to be painted. Who am I to resist?" In murals she can take risks and break the glass wall between gallery and decorative art.

"Murals," she says, "are art to be lived with."

Roberta Cruger is a Seattle writer. Harley Soltes is a Pacific Northwest staff photographer.