Do you remember the first time you got excited about interiors? I do, clear as day. It was 1994 and I was 13. After my father and stepmother’s messy divorce, I scored my (ex) stepsister’s bedroom. It was the first time I’d had my own room. Until then I’d shared with my younger sister Kate and in our early years we had a ‘telephone’ between our bunkbeds made of two toilet roll inners connected by a piece of string. That’s by the by…
When I moved into my new room I remember bursting into tears on my dad, proclaiming the room was “nothing like me!” What a brat, right? No doubt fuelled by divorce-related guilt, Dad got me a new (blue) carpet, yellow pine (cringe) tallboy and dressing table and new curtains made from navy fabric with gold stars and moons on it.
Oh, how I adored those curtains, and their matching cushions for my single bed (remember those?). I don’t know if it was the same in Australia, but back in the early nineties in the UK, if you were a teenager, stars and moons were everything.
This bedroom had a soundtrack of Blur and Nirvana and a smell of incense sticks and Calvin Klein CK One. I had a director’s chair, which I thought was extremely trendy, and soft toys were no longer allowed on the bed.
I think that’s where my obsession with interiors started. I really wish I had a photograph of that room now but I can see every detail if I just imagine it. Happy days…