The idea came from a “crazy” idea by her best friend
Julie Williams installed a ball pit into her seven-bedroom home(Image: SWNS)
From the outside, Julie Williams’ home in Birkdale looks like an ordinary four-storey house – inside it doesn’t look anything out of the ordinary either. It has all the usual rooms; seven bedrooms, a kitchen/breakfast room, two bathrooms, a beautiful garden and stunning sun room.
But there’s one addition that makes it stand out from everything else – a built-in play pit filled with around 11,300 plastic balls next to the master bedroom. Julie told the ECHO It was a “crazy idea” by her best friend that inspired the installation of a ball pit in her home. However, she didn’t need much persuasion to buy plastic balls and build the play area in an unused part of her seven-bedroom home.
So, what’s it like living with a your own play area right next to your bedroom? The IT consultant Julie says it’s a “special luxury” which she installed because she is “crazy.”
She said: “I had a room off one of my bedrooms that was basically an old staircase cut in half by the previous owners. There were bare walls, an old carpet ripped up and a banister that was old and covered in green paint.
“The previous owners look like they have cut the staircase off and bricked it over [making it into a closed off room]. The room was doing nothing but being used for storage, I didn’t know what else to do with it,” says the mum-of-one, who moved into her home in Birkdale in 2019.
So, that was when Julie’s best friend came up with the idea of transforming it into a ball pit. Julie said she didn’t take much persuasion to start on the “crazy idea.”
(Image: BBC)
The idea was inspired by a YouTube video tour of Cara Delevingne’s Los Angeles home which was described by Architectural Digest as “St-Tropez meets Coney Island meets Cotswolds cottage meets Monte Carlo meets butch leather bar.”
Julie added: “That’s what best friends are for, they come up with crazy ideas. We’d been to an exhibition in London where we went into a ball pit and it was amazing. It seemed like a great idea so I bought some balls, measured it up, bought some MDF and drilled it up, and ta da, we have a ball pit.”
Despite having an eight-year-old son Julie claims she uses the ball pit the most to relax in. She said: “He knows it’s mine, he asks if he can go in it. It’s my special luxury.”
After six years in their beautiful home Julie has decided to sell up. She said the home deserved a family with multiple children and not just her and her son to live in.
Julie, originally from Australia, moved to Birkdale after 23 years of living in London, said: “I put the house on the market last year because we decided to downsize, having seven bedrooms for one child is a bit over the top, I can fit a ball pit my house, how much space do I really need?
“I decided to move up here to give my son a different way of life and you can get a seven-bedroomed house in the north for the price of a one bedroom apartment in London.”
Julie loves living in Birkdale for its closeness to the beach and slower pace of life. She said: “It’s a beautiful property. I will be sad to leave it but we are looking to stay in the area, just somewhere smaller.”
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