It all began with a simple visit to the zoo – a day filled with wide-eyed wonder, infectious laughter, and little hands pointing excitedly at lions, monkeys, and bears. Watching her children’s joy, Surbhi N Bagla, founder of Chitrakaari, felt a spark. What if this magic and sense of discovery could live on in their everyday spaces? That moment inspired Zoo-tiful Chaos, Chitrakaari’s newest wallpaper collection. “Our former collection,” Surbhi says, “honored the world of botany – green trees, blossoming flowers, and flying birds. This time, we allowed the vegetation to yield to animal-like flora, challenging creatures to spark the tales children spin.”
Project Name: Zoo-tiful Chaos
Studio Name: Chitrakaari
With ethereal giraffes, compassionate elephants, snuggly bears, frolicking squirrels, regal lions, and splashing dolphins, Zoo-tiful Chaos unfurls across lovely patterns. Some of the paintings are whimsical and realistic – depicting scenes of foggy woods, secret paths and enchanting lakes – while others are playful and dreamy, setting friendly animals side by side in fantasy landscapes. The hues are taken from nature: blues, browns and greens, providing a soft, gentle warmth to each landscape, while the animals are brushed in muted, earthy colours that make them seem relaxed, friendly and full of character. These animals become so much more than framed photos on the wall. They become companions children converse with, name and invite into their narratives and games, infusing their bedrooms with an element of enchantment and reassurance.
The creation of each piece in the collection is started with hours of studying real-life animal imagery – watching their stances, faces and locomotion. Depending on the child’s age, the animals’ features and hues are then carefully adjusted – at times playful and whimsical, at others more realistic – to evoke a strong connection. These allusions are painstakingly rendered as hand-drawn illustrations and painted in subtle watercolours. The paintings are afterwards digitally processed – not only in order to scale them up to bigger wall surfaces, but also to adjust composition, balance, and clarity, and maintain minute textures. After refining, the compositions are printed onto textured paper with a feathered finish, providing an added texture which enhances their visual depth. The painstakingly slow, deliberate process is a testament to the artist’s sensitivity and attention to detail, making each painting both genuine and emotionally engaging.
Though Zoo-tiful Chaos was conceived with children’s bedrooms and play spaces at its core – particularly for first-time parents attracted to the sweet appeal of baby animals snuggled up with their mothers – its reach extends far wider. The more intricate, immersive designs, with their misty woods, roving critters, and sweeping horizons, are well-suited to casual dens, lazy lounges, teen bedrooms, house libraries, and even powder rooms.
What differentiates this collection is the seamless integration of whimsy and authenticity. Each animal, forest landscape, has a story to tell that ignites the imagination of a child. Not wallpaper, but the gateway to joyful adventures and peaceful moments of enchantment, all made with the same passion for detail and feeling that Chitrakaari is famous for. By drawing upon their immersive design language, this range furthers the relationship between space and narrative, each room a painting where dreams and memories find form.
