apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

all i'm going to say is this:

i was that girl who covered every. inch. of all four bedroom walls with posters and pictures cut from magazines.

This I'd love to hear about. It's one thing to turn the dining alcove in your one-bedroom into a baby-nursery, but where do you put teenage kids in New York apartments?

My teenage room was in the half-basement of a suburban house. Badly decorated with pictures I cut from magazines, and with my endless drawings of unicorns and dragons. Sigh.

My room was the epitome of cool though nobody would have thought it looking at me; I was tragically uncool as a kid.

But now, now I'm on a roll! I'm takin' over BABY! WATCH OUT 'CAUSE IT'S GO TIME!

Muahahahah!!!

My parents added on a second story in suburbia, so I got the old master bedroom. Blue and brown -- bed made up as a couch -- only framed stuff on the walls. I'd been planning my first studio apartment since age 8, so this was my chance to practice.

I thought the poll indicated readers don't want a kids'design month. I thought this was a democracy!

The walls of my room as a teenager were covered by Star Wars posters. I would still say Darth Vader is one of the coolest, sleekest designed objects in the universe.

An old boyfriend painted a surf mural on my wall. Still can't believe my mom let him! And every other wall was covered in skateboard and surfing posters. It was the 'Lords of Dogtown' era!

yeah - i was also that girl that cut up hundreds of magazines and covered the walls. i also put up found objects and other 'art', made my own tye-dye curtains for the closet, my dad made me a loft bed which housed my dresser underneath.
basically a self-contained unit of a room, but sooo cluttered.
I would HATE it now, but I loved it then.

Okay, I also have to admit that in high school I once threw a party at my house, provided spray cans and made the walls of my bedroom a guest book. We stole blinking construction lights and cones for decorations. It all seemed punk and interesting at the time...though in retrospect it just seems like a bad John Hughes movie set.

My room as a teenager was a deep red paint called Ming Red that my parents let me paint over the floral wallpaper my mom had lovingly selected. I had an 8'x10' Oriental wool rug on the floor that my parents had stored in the basement since they weren't using it. The rug was gorgeous - deep red, brown, amber and a hint of pale blue. I had an iron daybed with lots of cushions and a large chocolate brown leather couch, another piece my parents had discarded, for my friends to lounge on.
At the time, I thought it was kind of Goth-y. In retrospect, it was pretty cool as far as teen rooms go. Of course, I had lots of black drippy candles in bottles, a huge stereo, a giant Morrissey poster and stacks of Sassy magazine to take the edge off. It was 1990 after all.
Erin T

i tye dyed my sheets, angelune!

i also had the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, a plaster virgin mary lifted from someone's yard, etc. honestly, while my taste has mellowed out a lot since then, i don't know that it's really changed all that much, qualitatively. i still like kitsch and found objects, color, art, etc. i just don't need to cover every inch of my entire space with it.

a giant tapestry on the wall and a million collages of photos of family/friends, a collage made for every dance/trip/vacation/holiday along with endless cut-outs from magazines. i had my own phone line and cable tv so i pretty much did my best to hibernate there from after dinner until the next morning. (interesting, because i don't think i would let my kids have either one of those things in their room)

when i think of my teenage room i think of endless hours of (useless) phone conversations and the sound of my slamming door. oh, and the white furniture lined with gold trim that i just thought was so adult and cool. yikes.

opoponax - I was the guy that did that except with band and video game posters.

squeezed into a 12*12 room with three sisters, the younger that insisted on taping up headlines from the National Star, like "Shark Mauls Man as Wife Watches" and rescue photos the local PD gave out when they visited her school. In fact, last Christmas we recognized Captain Gary Waters of Portsmouth Police Department at Target because for years he was jumping out of a helicopter on my bedroom wall. Darth Vader poster that finally fell down in '99. Dime store Degas reproduction in an "antiqued" plastic frame.
i hang nothing on my walls now.

band posters, check
magazine cut outs over every conceivable inch, check
tye dyed curtains, check
black light posters, check
stolen street signs, check

I had my own phone line and cable too, I'm surprise my parent's even recognized me when I actually came out of my room.

I lived in a two hundred year old New England home, so my bedroom was a decent sized place with deep red walls and a fireplace. I kind of went with the feel of it. I had an old wooden four post bed, a sitting area in front of the fireplace, my father's old super heavy wood desk from when he was a kid. The room had built in drawers on one side, so the only free standing storage was a junky bookshelf.

One wall was decorated with xeroxes of Ed Gory drawings all lined up in rows (yes, I was a bit OCD then as well).

My room was quite a mixed combination. We lived in a suburban home, I shared my (pink) room with my sister, but once she got her own room in the remodel (house transformation is genetic) I went nuts - glitter paint on the walls, rock band posters (Poison!OMG!) and all my friends would write on every wall in the room. It worked, and evolved in a pretty interesting way - there was definitely a "personality" in the room, despite the pink walls, aluminum blinds, rose carpeting and 'french country' furniture.

No surprise, my house now has no carpeting, and no pink. No posters either, but still, tons of pictures of friends, traces of people who've been there.

I had a room in the basement when i got to high school. one wall was graffittied by my friends and i moms made me paint over it a few months later. posters of rappers, jazz greats, half naked women, skateboarders and bob marley. i had card board and linoleum for break dancing. my uncle's old nad reciever and amp and pio floor speakers. blacklight. out side my room the rest of the basement was mine with a tv and i used the bar to house my dj turntables and mixers and crates of records. i had clothes everywhere and old mcdonalds wrapper litered every surface. needless to say my friends loved my crib. my mom loathed it. she actually cleaned it a few times too. love you mom.
regards
j.d.wynn

p.s. we lived in a 1920ish chicago brick bungalow.

http://modmom.blogspot.com/

she's got a good eye and is worth taking a look at.