Roundup: Kids Rooms

Kids are great in small doses, but I don’t have any, and frankly, I don’t want any.  When friends tell me they’re having a baby, my gut response is not Congratulations! but rather It was nice having made your acquaintance.   I didn’t even enjoy being a kid, and I couldn’t wait to grow up.  In fact, were it not for the ending, the 1988 smash hit Big might have been my favorite movie. Tom Hanks plays Josh Baskin, a kid who wakes up, um, big, after making a wish on a Zoltar Machine at the local carnival.  In short order, Josh falls into a pretty posh life with a Manhattan loft, sweet job (as a toy exec no less) and even gets himself a girlfriend (i.e. the perfect life).  But in the end, Josh tracks down the  Zoltar machine, reverses his wish and returns to being a kid.  What kind of idiot kid would leave behind that loft?*  Totally unrealistic.

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But one of my most popular Strange Closets posts was about Super Reed, a superhero kid I met last year (Leo Design’s co-founder Stephanie Wirth‘s son).  And last spring, Chicago Home + Garden editor Gina Bazer and I collaborated on Babes in Design Land (May/June 2009).  Soon after that, I wrote yet another piece about Wirth and Reed for  Cookie Magazine; unfortunately, Conde Nast canceled the always entertaining parent’s pub just weeks before the issue went to press.  And most recently, the North Shore magazine Make It Better published my piece Kid-Friendly Rooms in Four Easy Steps.

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I write about kids for a number of reasons.  There’s the decor angle.  Kids are still irrepressible; their bedrooms seem to express their personality even when decorated by mom (or mom’s designer), and that’s refreshing.  And thankfully, today’s children seem much smarter than the dolts I had to suffer when I was but a lad.  (Having said that, I do weep for the future).  Finally, although when I was a bespectacled little nerd, I enjoyed more cerebral activities, but now I even enjoy rough housing with my nieces and nephews, which is way more fun knowing that they’ll automatically get blamed for any damage that might result.  And yes, those darn kids do indeed say the darnedest things.  So I guess that’s why I keep pitching articles about them.  Click here for more kids-related stories.

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Top caption: My inner kid makes himself know in fairly literal ways.

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See more of this spectacular Buchanan home, which belongs to Front owners Joe Paulicci and Tom Hitchcock in the Winter 2010 issue of CS Interiors – on newsstands now).

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Decorated and styled by Leslie Dyke.

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Decorated and styled by Leslie Dyke.

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Click here for Karl and Dawn’s Open House.

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Click here for Hilary Bailes’ Open House.

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Logan’s room.  From Pegboard Modern owner David and Amy Carter’s Open House.

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SuperReed’s room.

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* I have to admit, I felt the same exact way at the end of the Devil Wears Prada.

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