Summer Alaedeen needed to make the interior design equivalent of a buzzer-beating, game-winning half-court shot. A Westlake couple had hired her to redecorate their basketball-loving 11-year-old son’s bedroom as a surprise, and no mass-produced theme wallpaper or team logo decal would do.
The light yellow room boasted a vaulted tray ceiling and large window, complete with a window seat, flanked by built-in bookcases. But the only indication that a sports fan slept there was a gray comforter studded with NFL team logos and a basketball hoop hung over a closet door.
“I wanted to find a really unique wall feature that actually came to life in the room,” says the co-owner of Westlake-based Adeas Interior Design.
Inspiration came while she was scrolling through a social media site: basketballs mounted on a wall. A subsequent conversation with the homeowners produced the idea of turning the tray ceiling into a Cleveland Cavaliers home court.
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Alaedeen prepared the room for the colorful additions by painting the walls and ceiling white and the ceiling’s perimeter black, then replacing the cream carpeting with a heather-gray counterpart. The homeowners wanted to retain the baby blue and white-striped cornice box and dark blue window seat cushion. So Alaedeen papered the bookshelf backs in a similar blue-and-white stripe and painted the cherry-stained built-ins ocean blue.
To source the 50 basketballs for the wall installation, Alaedeen turned to Dina Younis, a professional thrifter based in Akron.
“I didn’t want a bunch of brand new basketballs on the wall,” Alaedeen explains. “I wanted something that looked curated, looked like [the boy] had collected this over time.”
She deflated the balls to create different sizes and shapes, making sure that those with logos, signatures and designs remained sufficiently inflated and shaped to show them off, then razor-cut a one-inch slit in the back of each for hanging on a coat hook. The balls were mounted in rows above a royal-blue upholstered headboard and aged driftwood nightstands.
“It was actually more difficult to deflate them, even with the razor cut,” Alaedeen recalls.
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Mo Ali of North Ridgeville-based Limelights Entertainment approximated one of the Cavs’ home court designs, along with Alaedeen’s rendering of the surrounding fan-filled seating sections, on custom decal panels. “[The homeowners] love carpeting in the bedrooms, so I knew we weren’t going to get away with putting a flooring in there,” Alaedeen replies when asked why the court ended up on the ceiling. The “aisles” are actually strips of black wood trim added to cover panel seams.
“I didn’t like the look of just the decal on the ceiling,” she explains. “It wasn’t perfect enough, it wasn’t straight enough. Honestly, it’s not due to the company that created it — it was due to just the irregularity of standard walls.” A Pottery Barn Teen lighting fixture consisting of a white globe in a black chain basket was hung from center court.
Alaedeen incorporated items representing the boy’s passion for other sports into the decor. A helmet signed by Jordan Love, Josh Jacobs and Jayden Reed of the Green Bay Packers — a favorite NFL football team — and Reed’s signed gloves are displayed with his collection of NBA-star bobbleheads on the bookshelves. And the NFL team-logo comforter remained. The child’s mother didn’t replace it because he loved it so much.
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That love now extends to the entire room. The boy literally flipped onto his bed when he saw the complete redo. Alaedeen believes that as long as he’s a hoops fan, he won’t outgrow the decor. His parents have told her that it wows adult male friends and relatives who see it.
“There are so many guys that are like, ‘I would love this room for my room!’” she says.
Curating a variety of basketballs from the past to the present was a slam dunk for Dina Younis.
Among the options that the Akron-based professional thrifter sourced for Adeas Interior Design co-owner Summer Alaedeen: a gold Cleveland Cavaliers ball emblazoned with the team’s 1970s swashbuckling cavalier logo from Play It Again Sports in Cuyahoga Falls; a Spalding edition stamped with Boston Celtics great Larry Bird’s signature from a Goodwill store in Cuyahoga Falls; and a NCAA Final Four promotional specimen from a Goodwill store in Medina.
“Goodwill, Salvation Army, Volunteers of America — any type of bigger retail [thrift] chain like that will almost always have a large sporting goods section,” Younis says. “I started with places like that. … I [got] the balls for anywhere from $1 to $5 max.”
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