Jump on and your stress slides away
SUSANNA PARRY MICHAELIS, 47, is an art consultant and singer in the band Stax. She’s married to Alex, 53, an architect. Between them they have seven children: Zac, 20, Olive, 18, Kit, 17, Orlando, 16, Ro, 16, Samb, 11, and Raffe, eight. Susanna says:
WHEN we built our home four years ago, our whole ethos was that houses don’t have to be serious places. With seven children, we wanted this to be a fun space for everyone, so when Alex suggested an indoor slide I thought it was a great idea.
Made of white Corian (a hard material used for kitchen worktops), the slide runs adjacent to a curving staircase starting from the upstairs landing, where the bedrooms are, down to the ground floor hallway.
Corian is an incredibly smooth material and can be shaped to order. But the fact that the slide had to be curved and is around five metres long made it quite a challenge for the builders.
It also required us to have a wider space than you’d normally need for stairs and the slide worked out to be slightly steeper than we imagined.
At first, we had a small mat at the bottom, but when one of the children crashed at high speed into the wall three metres away, I realised we needed a much larger, thicker mat, plus extra cushioning on the wall.
Our children all love it and the house is popular for playdates, sleepovers and parties. It’s also extremely useful for sending clothes, forgotten school books and swimming bags down rather than having to run up and down stairs.
When people come over for dinner or drinks you can see the adults eyeing up the slide, secretly desperate to have a go, but they only usually ask when they’ve had a few drinks. Some don’t anticipate quite how steep it is and have a bit of a fright as they come speeding down.
The youngest boys, Raffe and Samb, use the slide most and frequently climb up it, too, rather than taking the stairs. But if we’ve had a stressful day, there’s nothing like a quick go on the slide to blow the cobwebs away.