CHILDREN’S WORLDS
Abundant research has proven that children who grow up in environments with stimulating shapes, colors and textures develop greater creativity and intellectual skills. Sadly, I often see children’s rooms that totally lack any type of design, places where different ideas have been thrown together in a chaotic mix. Those types of environments hardly stimulate their creativity or give them a sense of order. In my projects I treat children as their own people, little clients with their own needs and preferences for their spaces. Each child is different and his or her room should be unique as well. A child’s room should never be improvised and a lot of thought should be placed on room layout and on each and every piece of furniture placed in their environment. Photograph #1 shows a room I designed for a girl whose favorite colors were yellows, greens and raspberry red. She also favored rich patterned fabrics so I selected over 30 different small patterns and married them together in the fabrics for the window seat cushion and pillows, draperies, her night table cover, rocking chair and most importantly in her custom quilted bedspread. The diamond pattern of that bedspread is repeated on a subtle stencil pattern of yellow on cream in a wall that provides background for naïve art of her favorite rock stars. Her room has a wicker desk where she can do her homework and an open floor play area for tea parties and whatever her imagination leads her to create in a space that can be easily cleared by placing toys in bins that are stored in her closet.
Photograph #2 is a room I designed for a boy who loves sci-fi and will be a teenager in a couple of years. For him I designed the “space-ship” steel bed with attached swinging nightstands that incorporate lamps, a mesh headboard and legs that resemble that of landed space ship. The carpet I selected has a bluish grey pile that matches the paint I chose for walls and ceiling. The strong color accents come from the red chair at his “work station” and the stripes on his otherwise black bedspread. This room truly matches this boy’s personality and interests and will easily transition to the more “teenage” environment he will need in a couple of years; it will do so with originality and a sense of innovation, the two ingredients he will need as the engineer he wants to become one day.
