The Other Bedroom
A bedroom is a self-contained world, a reflection of the identity of its inhabitant. There has long been a kind of fascination with teenage bedrooms in particular, in fact there’s an entire Tumblr dedicated to people submitting photos of their rooms for others’ visual pleasure. Editor in chief of Rookiemag, Tavi Gevinson, has spoken extensively on her obsession with such spaces, expressing:
“Is there any sanctuary so vital to the human experience as this, a place to just be away from everybody, listen to music, and procrastinate homework by lying in bed staring at the ceiling? I say no. Amid all the woes of teenage life, the bedroom is the one place you can make your own.” -Tavi Gevinson
Within the category of the teenage bedroom there is a significantly less well-documented subsection: the “other” bedroom. Whether it is that the person has moved away to university and has this room for only part of the year, or because they alternate their time between two parents houses, these part-time worlds deserve some attention. “Other” bedrooms are less permanent fixtures, and unlike the typical teenage bedroom, have not had the chance to cultivate over time according to the owners’ changing tastes. They show more of a moment in time than a representation of their whole life to date. Interior designer Theresa Meisl describes a temporary bedroom as “your nest and where you can go back to, to feel like yourself”. This makes constructing a space that feels like “you”, now, ever more important. Three girls in their late teens welcome us to the worlds they’ve created in their part-time bedrooms.
Ruby’s bedroom wall
Ruby lives in a share house in Camden. After living in halls in her first year of university, she decided to go about constructing her current room differently: “I didn’t bring that much stuff from my room before because I wanted to decorate it fresh, so I’ve got quite a lot of stuff up from the summer I had” she points to a tube map on the wall, “for example I spent the summer in Germany, and that’s the tube map from Dresden”. A big part of making a room like this your own is covering the walls, “you can’t paint the walls so you have to adorn them in some way”, as put by Theresa. In fact, one of the most interesting things in Ruby’s room is a little wood shelf display, the kind usually reserved for displaying collectible toys. “I really like that area” she gestures towards the unit, “because it’s all things I’ve collected, like a museum of me, of the past year. All the things have random stories for how I got them.” Taking a little organza bag off the shelf, Ruby says excitedly, “for Halloween a couple of my friends and I went to this thing at the British Library called the sorting and it was a creepy event where you went round and atoned for your sins by doing these different exercises. For greed they gave you all these sweets and they said to choose whether you eat them or not, and I ate them” she laughs, “this one was envy and you had to write something you’re jealous of, put it with lavender to cleanse it, and wrap it up.” Ruby describes herself as a “very stuff-oriented person” so she likes to have these kinds of things around her. Other items on her self of curiosities include a mini cheese grater, an innocent smoothie bobble hat, and “natural look” false eyelashes.
Bella’s Wall, photo by Bella
For the past six years, Bella has spent half of her time living with her mum. To make the room feel more like her own, pictures tile her walls- they’re “pictures and stuff from magazines, and a lot of my artwork… they all have some importance, and most of them are connected to things that have happened to me, so one of them is this poster that this guy gave me a long time ago, or like there’s a ticket from my trip to America.” This room is her much more up-to-date version, as she describes “I have a room at my dad’s that’s the same as when I was like four or something and never bothered to change anything.” While her room is not exactly as she’d like it, “if there was more space or I had more motivation I would do something about changing it”, her bedroom keeps some of her favourite things- “my photography books and my guitars.”
Claudia’s desk
Claudia’s clothes rack
Claudia, who lives in a share house in New Cross, places greatest importance on optimizing the space in her tiny room; “Having a rack instead of a big heavy wardrobe seemed like a good idea. I like it so much because every morning when I’m getting dressed its like I’m going shopping!” Her only qualm with the space her distaste for the wallpaper, which she reluctantly has to live with, “according to our estate agent if I take the wallpaper off, the entire house will fall down” she says sarcastically. Even though she’s only lived here for six months, Claudia has spent a lot of time rearranging her room until it’s exactly as she wants it. “I’m perfectly happy to treat it like I’m going to be living here for the next ten years. I’ve got quite good at making a small temporary space feel permanent because of having to move around so much.” In the past two years she has moved back and forth between her two parents and one of her sisters’ houses. “This is my preferred bedroom though, because it’s the only room that completely belongs to me.”