Theme for a room...

As youngsters, our rooms were just extensions of ourselves. Whether it was a girl or a boy, we just used our own initiative and creativity to make our rooms different from the rest of the house. Usually posters of films or sports stars graced our walls. As we grew up, the ‘Love Is’ posters were in fashion and we bought them off street hawkers for little or nothing and pasted them behind doors or on cupboards. I had a great collection of shiny stickers which my aunt had sent me from Germany which I stuck along the edge of my dressing table. Book shelves full of my favourite Enid Blyton or Richmal Cromptions ‘William’ series and Gerald Durrell’s nature rambles.

Today a girl’s own room is considered a personal space that can inspire and motivate her. Taking a tour of Ramkrishna Karuturi’s (the largest producer of roses in the world) home, the rooms designed by him for his daughters have the personal stamp of each of his young girls.

He believes, “Regardless of her age, involve your daughter in the planning to make sure the decorated room reflects her personality and becomes a room she loves. Every girl wants to feel proud of her bedroom when she takes her girlfriends to it,” he says. So this modern day dad sat down with the girls, his wife and the interior decorator before the final choice of everything in the room was made.

You may have your own ideas to decorate your daughter’s room, but, the best place to start, when decorating a girl’s room, is to sit down with her and discuss any ideas she might have.

All girls are brimful of ideas as to how they want their room to look. However guidance is the key, as girls are renowned for wanting every extravagance possible.

Age matters

Depending on her age, you may need to make suitable suggestions about colours and furnishing and allow her to pick from these.

An older college going girl will have fairly definite ideas for her room, but again, you may need to gently and tactfully guide her to make suitable choices.

Tell her firmly when you start to plan that she must remember, that the finished room has to stay that way until you are prepared to go through the whole decorating process again. That will probably be, only after a few years.

When decorating girls’ rooms, choosing a theme, makes the process so much easier. It gives you a focus when you are deciding on a colour scheme, furnishings and accessories.

Once a theme is decided on, choosing everything else is a much simpler process, as you know what you are looking for.

Suitable themes for younger girls include fairies, princesses or angels (all little girls love these!); or an animal theme like ponies, cats or monkeys; or her favourite character from a book or movie; or a room decorated around her favourite colours or flowers.

Ramkrishna had decorated his younger daughter’s room in shades of pink, with the bedspread thickly embroidered with roses and the bed had delicate muslin curtains.
If you are decorating a room for a teenager or older girl, the process will be similar but she will be able to contribute more towards making choices. Allow her to express her ideas about how to decorate her room, but also offer guidance and make common sense decisions.

Even if you personally dislike the finished decor, she will be especially proud of it if she had a large part to play in achieving the result.

If your teenager loves her room, maybe that will be incentive to keep it clean and tidy!
With your older girl, work out a budget for the design, and insist she sticks with it. This is an excellent learning experience about the value of money and the costs of things; allow her to learn that there is more to decorating girls’ rooms than just having fun. Work on the budget together, and make decisions on the larger items first. It may be that some of her current furniture has to be retained and not replaced, as she would like.

It’s all about compromise; and decorating her room will be a great life-lesson.
Get her to make list of things she needs, wants and would like – encourage her to understand the difference between these three lists.

Decorating a girl’s room can be exciting –keep it simple, stay focused on the theme and curb her over-enthusiasm to imitate maybe, what her best friend has.