Bedrooms

Learning interior design through the rooms of my childhood

A few months ago, my college roommate came and met my baby girl, and we realized she was meeting my home for the first time, too. We met our freshman year, pledging the same sorority and ending up living together until graduation. Besides my Price and my mother, she is the most fluent in the detailed language of my mundane life, or at least was for that sweet, fleeting period of time. Having her in my home, wandering the halls together, pointing out the handmade dining table, pieces of art from my honeymoon, the inside of my closet to show her a new dress I’d bought resale, made my heart ache over girlhood. Made me wish we were nineteen again, sleeping five feet apart.

When I showed her my bedroom, she laughed and just said, “it smells like your bedroom.” It made me think of spring break in eighth grade; I’d gone on a mission trip with my youth group, the same trip every year, and after my shower, as I nestled into a quilt on concrete floors (I learned later to bring an air mattress and heated blanket), a friend saw my huge yellow bottle of Nivea lotion. “That’s what it is…that’s what you smell like.” These two moments felt the same…being known through the memory of smell.

That night, after Kyla left and Kit was wrapped into her swaddle, I laid in bed with my wicker lamp on, thinking about the small, intimate things that make up a person. How it all accumulates into our bedrooms, where our collections live, our books and pictures, little precious things tucked away between journal pages, in old shoe boxes, where our smell wafts in and around as we make our beds, open our closets, brush our hair.

It made me feel glad when she knew the smell, that despite the presence of two new human beings living amongst me, my bedroom is the same.

It has me thinking about interior design, this elusive career for some, subconscious passion for others (me). I know this: home design is a form of art…the most intimate, lingering, everchanging, precious form. And when people ask me to define what “style” my home falls under, wishing for keywords to search on pinterest, specific style décor to purchase, I leave those questions unanswered. Because within this smell-of-my-bedroom train of thought, it has become so evident my innate style, the way I stacked books and placed things before one scrolled home accounts and pinterest feeds. Interior design, this subjective art form, I think spills from your mind, your childhood and how your mom made your bed, your first loves, your favorite books and the homes that exist in them – the ones you created as you read, your favorite time of day, favorite month of the year.

So I thought we’d do a little walk through the stories of my bedrooms, the heart of my love for home design, where I first learned I loved how things looked when arranged a certain way.

The first bedroom I remember was a tiny baby pink square in our long, blue house that my brother and I have encapsulated in our minds as the most mythical childhood home of all childhood homes. I was in the fifth grade when we moved to the house my parents still live in today, and leaving was the first heartbreak I ever experienced. We needed to leave…the house had one bathroom the size of a closet, significant flooding issues, small bedrooms…but my throat feels tight when I think about that house still. When I think about my room, it’s of the white metal twin bed that felt cool at night when I touched the headboard, the handmade quilts as comforters. I think of the dresser, painted white with my pink jewelry box on top and fabric as a liner. Of my nightlight, a gold lamp that changed dimness with the touch of my fingertips. A wooden bed for my babies nestled under the window to the backyard, where I had a view of my blue playhouse that eventually wound up as a chicken coop behind my papaw’s home. I remember, too, a tiny Christmas tree on the corner of my dresser, laced with the colorful light strands and handmade felt ornaments, little white angels made from yarn. As I got older, my grammy’s chartreuse green desk found a home with me, my typewriter on a metal rolling desk beside it. It held my mom’s real estate business cards, my tiny locket journal, pictures of my friends and blue ribbons from my summer swim meets. That room was sunny in the daytime, golden lamplight before bed. Just forever sweet in my memories.

When we moved, I got the biggest room in the house, merely because the other room upstairs was floor to ceiling wood paneling and better suited for my brother. I remember being in disbelief at the thought of a room like that…built-in bookshelves, windows on every wall, three closets. My grandpa painted it a creamy lime green at my request, and I slept in a new Pottery Barn full-size bed, my brother in the sleeper sofa nestled in the corner. That couch was red floral and lived in our den at the old house…I’m not really sure why it ended up in my room, or when exactly it left, but for the time being, it was a comforting piece of an old home.

When I turned fifteen, my parents gave me the beloved teenage rite of passage: a room makeover. We used the same interior designer, an old family friend who did the flowers at my parents wedding, for the rest of our new house, and so he did my room, too. Plum walls, coral ceiling, turquoise furniture, bright quilts and patterned rugs, huge looming lamps and mustard bookends that looked like a coral reef. I remember being so sad that first night as I laid in bed, thinking about how little time I’d get to spend growing up in that room, wishing I was younger.

I lived a lot of life in my sunset treehouse, though. That winter, I fell in love with a boy I thought was my soulmate, and my room became a lamplit world with goodnight messages and underlining sweet words from A Fault in Our Stars. As high school went on, I loved my room most at nighttime, seeing the moon from my windowsills, listening to the rain on my roof, writing journal entries from the floral chaise nestled in the corner by my desk. I did a few classes online one summer, and my room became my school. A printer on the floor by my standing jewelry box, a clunky laptop on the blue desk that was once chartreuse. My bookshelves were lined with Babysitter’s Club, Christy Miller, Nancy Drew I read at my granny’s house, old yearbooks and a purple and white hand painted piggy bank that once held fifty dollars in coins, and I thought I was rich. I framed pictures of our childhood golden retriever, the youth group, eight by tens of me and my dad, a tiny, tiny picture of said boy printed on computer paper, right beside my bed. I saved every single thing that ever meant anything to me…prom corsages still pinned onto my cork board in the big closet, birthday cards, ticket stubs, a stray baseball from a high school game, broken goggles, little notes tucked away in J.Crew shoeboxes stacked three high on top of my pine wardrobe.

During the summers between my college years, my room became a maze of storage, but lovely still. I’d set my television up on the rattan table at the end of my bed and watch Love Island UK and Bachelor in Paradise late into the night, quiet as to not wake my brother down the hall. And when I started dating Price, he’d come stay for weekends, me in the guest rooms downstairs and him in mine, sleeping underneath the colorful quilts and coral ceiling.

I think my own sense of maximalist interiors started making itself known in my first room outside of the house. It was a cinderblock room painted mustard at the end of the freshman girls’ dorm hallway, one window, a sink, and a shared bathroom with the room beside us. I lofted my bed as high as it could go, fitting the ugly yellow wood desk with a gray plastic top under it. The summer before, we went to a furniture shop in town and bought a light blue swivel rocker, then to the flea market for a shelf I later painted pink and now houses Kit’s extra diapers and wipes. My mom and I picked out fabric from Hobby Lobby for her to make a quilt out of, and we used the scraps for a garland on the wall. My first night in that room, I used clothespins to hang pictures along the strand, as many as I could, as many memories I could possibly force under that twin XL bed. I wanted people to know who I loved before them, before college. Chosen pictures are so powerful in a home design.

I fell homesick fast, crying in the shower that first night so my roommates wouldn’t know. Slowly, I began accumulating things from home to make my dorm feel more like it…pillows from the living room with the corners chewed off by Henry the golden, picture frames from my bedroom bookshelves, blankets washed in Mom’s detergent. I brought with me my grammy’s old jewelry case, a cherry wood with teal blue satin lining. I remember leaving the card my dad wrote me the morning of move-in day on my desk the entire year, the card and the words so pretty and undeserving of the inside of a J.Crew box quite yet.

The room felt like a colorful, girly, DIY effort at who I wanted people to see me as that first year, a room I could try to reinvent myself in.

By my sophomore year though, I felt my style was already refined. Our room had sheetrock and the sink was separate, and that was enough to make me feel like I was grown. I bought a white desk shelf from an upperclassman, crisp new bedding, and printed off my carefully VSCO-edited pictures for hanging. My big purchase for this room was a $300 brownish-cream desk chair from Office Depot. And my very first Erin Condren.

This room had a story to tell: I was a happy, friendly, confident girl, involved, cared for, well read. This was the first room Kyla and I shared, our beds both facing the window with a view of the underclassmen cul-de-sac, where we sat for hours watching the comings and goings of our friends. We had a hallway outside our bedroom, where the red hutch from Kit’s room then acted as our kitchen, holding boxes of k-cups and loafs of bread, paper plates, and my wooden box of real ones that I washed in the bathroom sink.

Both Kyla and I will say that was our favorite place to live in college.

As we entered into our upperclassmen years, we qualified for the very, very top floor in the corner of the nicest dorm on campus. For the first semester, Kyla and I shared a room again, our individual sides nearly identical to the year before. My bookshelf-styling abilities, I think, got better, more dimensional as I brought more boxes of books from home and accumulated more for class and didn’t sell at the end of the year.

By winter, though, I had moved across the hall for the chance to have a tiny room to myself. That room felt like such a luxury, like hot buttered bread, like milk chocolate ice cream, like my mom’s chocolate chip cookies. It is perhaps prettier in my mind than it was in real life…but it was all mine, and that was precious. I had a corner by the window for my swivel rocker and a wire rack that could barely hold the weight of my Bible, a corner at the foot of my bed for my mini fridge and a tiny coffee machine I barely used – my very first kitchen of my own. I stacked baskets under my bed to hold all my high heels, and on my nightstand sat a huge mirror and my favorite picture of my mom and me. That semester started with a break up, followed by my first solo re-watch of The Office, accompanied with tubs of raw cookie dough I ate like ice cream. I wasn’t as sad as I thought I’d be, but I think that room helped. I hung a calendar of golden retriever puppy dogs by the door and kept my heated blanket on the bed until May, and living that way healed my broken heart.

For senior year, Kyla and I moved down the road to an off-campus apartment complex, which we so fondly considered our mansion. Ice cold stone floors, two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, living room, and a laundry room we only shared with each other…never mind I had to clean eyebrow hairs off the walls by the bathroom sink. For the first time, our college living arrangement felt like a home, with our cars parked outside our front door and rowdy neighbors above us and contraband candles hidden in my peacoat pockets at the back of my closet. The summer before, my mom and I restored an antique full bed with an upholstered headboard and two matching nightstands. We sanded it for days down in the muggy garage of our flower shop, painting the entire thing a creamy white with too-small brushes. My red hutch came back, but this time as a bookshelf and a desk, complete with the wicker chair from my grammy’s desk that had lived in my room for nearly two decades now. I filled my nightstands with journals and pajamas, topped with my favorite lamp and that same picture of me and mom, a little silk arrangement in a green pot that is now in the nursery. And I found my beloved gold and silver frames at Homegoods, pictures of my brother, my dad, and my childhood best friends I felt were slipping away from me, the heartbreaking end of childhood, in black and white. In the corner, I stole a cheetah swivel chair from my room at home, an antique milk glass lamp, and nailed matted covers of the New Yorker I’d collected from a few trips to the city while in college.

That room was where Kyla and I would catch up in my doorway after class, where I discovered my love for weighted blankets, where Price told me he loved me for the very first time.

After I graduated, I moved for a job in publishing, moving into a corner one-bedroom apartment with gray walls and light vinyl flooring and a kitchen with an island. It took a week to move in, slowly unloading suitcases of books and journals and picture frames after work every day, then driving back home to do it all over again. (I was commuting from home at that point.) My room felt like an adult version of all my dorm rooms…my antique bed with powder soft white bedding and big fluffy pillows, the most beautiful painting from my childhood bedroom – a vase of orange and pink and red tulips framed in wood, my red hutch overflowing with stacked books (I brought even more from home, since I was moving out for good this time), and a huge, tattered green velvet armchair so heavy nobody wanted it anymore. I hung curtains and kept a tiny vase of flowers at my bedside, nestled that little wire rack with my jewelry box on top by the door. The window had a view of the swimming pool, and I wished for the garden side of the complex, but I was happy.

And just like a dorm room, within a year, we were loading up my dad’s flower shop van with everything I owned and moving me into my married bedroom, my treehouse on the corner in the blue saltbox house. When we bought it, the ceiling and trim were navy blue, so Price spent a week painting over it with soft white, painting the walls in a warm green that felt like my parent’s bedroom in that long house with my pink bedroom. We found a black metal bedframe with a linen headboard and made it with a brand new Pottery Barn quilt off of our wedding registry. Our nightstands were secondhand: mine from an estate sale and Price’s from Mimi’s attic. And in the corner by the wall of windows covered in Ralph Lauren pinch-pleated curtains we bought for $15 a panel sat my heavy green chair.

That room felt like our honeymoon, prolonged. We stayed up late that summer watching Olympic swimming live, finishing the new season of Outer Banks, binging Only Murders in the Building, that distinct theme song so nostalgic now. That room was Annie’s first bedroom. Our first bedroom we renovated and designed ourselves. Where I watched snowfall a year later, crying over seeing my house listed on Zillow, despite the sweet answered prayer of moving home.

And finally, our cottage bedroom, the one my baby girl is sound asleep in as I write. When we first imagined our home renovation, we gave ourselves the front bedroom, the one with a closet and more space. But one Sunday after church, as we walked around stirring the dust and spiderwebs, dreaming, Price said we should take the back bedroom, leave the big room for babies, make the house last longer. So I drew custom wardrobes and scoured Facebook Marketplace for a cherry wood poster bed, ordered linen bedding and a cream hooked rug, $5 sheer curtains from Walmart. When we moved in on a rainy January weekend, I ran miles around the house putting things away, fooling myself into thinking I could get this house in order within a day. Of course, I didn’t, but by that first night, I had our bedroom put together, our bed made, a candle lit, the windows drawn.

This room was designed with years and years in mind. Painted that same shade of warm green as my parents, for my hope to offer the same mothering warmth in this room one day. Expensive white bedding that feels like sleeping in our honeymoon cottage on the beach in Rhode Island. A desk as my nightstand, a nod to my identity in writing, in reading, in words, and my grammy’s wicker chair. The room inches towards completion every month or so, with the addition of an art piece Price finds on eBay, a vase of dried hydrangeas, a new picture frame (because I believe in family pictures everywhere in your home), another coffee table added to the stack. I play with euro sham covers constantly, adding quilts to the end of my bed for warmth, both physically and emotionally.

By this point, there are physical items recognizable from past bedrooms…my chair, my box made of mirrors, my jewelry box, my books, that picture of Mom and me nailed in my bookshelf. But I think, too, you can tell the same girl lives in this sunny green room, who also grew up in the pink one. The pink one next door to another green room, filled with a cherry wood sleigh bed and chest with dried hydrangeas on top, pictures of my brother and me on the dresser.