![]() ![]() ![]() 1 (1969-1974), the dollhouse used in this live-action song was built by Jim Henson for his two daughters. TRIVIA: According to the booklet from Sesame Street - Old School, Vol. Elmo wants to learn about all the different kinds of homes An igloo, an apartment, a tree house, or even a trash can for Oscar the Grouch can be a home -S. On the "The Count Counts!" album (see below) If you buy something through a link on the site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Two Little Dolls Two Little Dolls aka Henson Dollhouse We love the products we feature and hope you do, too. ![]() While I probably won’t give the go-ahead for a gator pool, should they want to procure a library cabinet or nail up some old hubcaps, I’m all for it. They’re only five, but soon enough, they’ll be tweens and teens, just like Clarissa. The thing is, though, that any design choices I make in my kids’ room now probably won’t last. There’s a cartoonish faux-tiger rug on the floor, a jam-packed house-shaped bookshelf in the corner, and I found a vintage Sesame Street poster at a garage sale that I’ll get around to framing one of these days. I’m a mom now, too, and I think subconsciously, I was channeling Clarissa when I pulled together my own kids’ room a few years back. I may not have sprung for hubcaps, but I found an old papier-mache grocery store meat counter display at some flea market, and it’s moved with me from city to city for almost a decade. Her perceived ingenuity and thriftiness have inspired estate sale purchases and left-field design choices, like the three-foot-tall black velvet motorcycle painting that sat over my fireplace for years or the brightly colored geometric quilt on my bed at this very moment. It feels bizarre to say, but in some sense, I’ve been chasing the essence of Clarissa’s teenage bedroom in my own home ever since. (You’ve got to think that Clarissa’s dad, Marshall Darling, got what she was going for given that he was a programmatic architect, working in salt shaker houses and beehive-shaped hair salons.) To me, both then and now, Clarissa’s room represented not only who the character was as an inherently cool, quirky (and entirely fictional) kid, but also the idea that it was possible to push the boundaries of our own space-particularly, as in Clarissa’s case, through found objects and affordable (and mostly reversible) tweaks. While I know now that Clarissa’s room was the result of multiple adults toiling over creating what a cool teenage room would look like, that doesn’t take away any of its magical impact. A boy! In her room! Popping over without calling! Whenever! And no parents cared! It was beyond cool. And that’s not even to mention the whole "ladder into an open window" situation that Clarissa’s male best friend, Sam, used to get into her room at any given time. As someone whose parents wouldn’t even let them hang posters on their own wallpaper, lest it somehow get ruined, I was deeply, deeply jealous. It was clear that girl-coded floral wallpaper on some of the walls had been painted over in parts with a loose, black checkerboard pattern. She also had quite eclectic wall decor, from hubcaps to They Might Be Giants posters. She had a walk-in closet stuffed with brightly colored and richly patterned clothes, and a bed that appeared to be at least a full size, something that, as the owner of a very uncomfortable twin at the time, I greatly envied. (Places like Pottery Barn actually make these now, proving that I must not have been the only person coveting it back then.) She had her own computer-a big deal back in 1991, when the show premiered-and what appeared to be an old card catalog in lieu of a dresser. She had room for her baby "security alligator," Elvis, in his sand-filled kiddie pool, and a bookshelf made out of what appeared to be a repurposed old dollhouse. Sure, it was in her parents’ house, but, really, it was Clarissa’s own little world. To me and to so many others, it was the ideal teenage space. More than anything, though, I admired intentionally wacky bedroom occupied by Melissa Joan Hart’s character on Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All. Claudia had her own phone line and plenty of art supplies, and even though the books never gave an incredibly detailed description of what her room looked like, I had to imagine it was eclectic and fabulous, just like its inhabitant. The first was Claudia Kishi’s candy-stuffed hideaway, where The Baby-Sitters Club held all their meetings in the children’s book series. This essay is part of a collection of love letters celebrating personal design obsessions.Īs a girl growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, there were two fictional bedrooms I really admired. ![]()
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