I used to sneak into my mother’s room to use her telephone. I was trying to win an inflatable armchair, or a mini-fridge, or a portable television. I was dreaming of furnishing my own bedroom with objects of fantasy. I wanted to live like a child on T.V., free from normal power relations. The sassy child’s interior of the nineties was what I wanted, and nothing represented that more than an inflatable vinyl armchair in translucent neon pink. In a magazine I found an advert for a phone-in competition. You phoned a premium-rate line and had a choice of different games you could play; one involved pressing the keypad to choose which corner of the goal you were going to try to shoot an imaginary ball into. There was a recorded message saying you should check with the bill-payer, but I never did.

The thought crossed my mind that I would have nothing to put in my mini-fridge and that no doubt I would be prevented from watching television in my own room. But the inflatable armchair; who could deny me this squeaky throne? Maybe I would win a CD player and I could impress my friends, perhaps I would acquire a mini basketball hoop, I would have my own computer and a large model Ferris Wheel made from K’nex.. It would set me up as a ruler in my own bedroom, at once an item of adult sophistication and an object of tactile absurdity, the near-to-bursting inflatable would give me what I desired. I was certain of it. 

I was influenced by the bedrooms I saw on television, particularly American ones. The nineties aesthetic epitomised by television programmes made by Nickelodeon. The U.S. kids television channel forged an aesthetic of grunge and gunge which gave my generation of children the last bits of the optimism and self-belief of those who grew up on MTV. The twisted geometry, the gross-out humour, the wise-cracks, the saturated colours. It was everything I wanted and could not have. 

The two objects of furniture perhaps most emblematic of this time are the bean bag and the inflatable armchair. Both of which were designed by radical Italian furniture designers associated with the Anti-Design movement of the late sixties. The first versions of both of these things were manufactured by the pioneering furniture company from Milan, Zanotta. The Blow armchair and the Sacco beanbag chair were each made as an attack on the previous generation's commitment to utility and structure. They were objects designed as a kind of critique; they epitomise the baby boomer generation’s contributions to the twentieth century. The rejection of convention and the embrace of a kind of ragged individualism.  A commitment to freedom at the expense of all else trickled down into the bedrooms of Nickelodeon tweens. An aesthetic which perfectly suited the children that were born into the end of history. The bean bag chair resonates with the sort of parenting that children were supposed to want; all support and no structure.. A formless item of furniture which offered no discipline but was always ready with an embrace. Constant validation translated into a sack of polystyrene balls. 

In the 1980s when Nickelodeon set designers were planning the look of their new gunge-centric television show Double Dare they specifically drew on the Italian designs of the Memphis Group. The bright colours and chaotic geometry of their designs building on the legacy of the Anti-Design movement and deconstructing modernism to create environments which were at once pleasurable and irreverent. The wild montage of colours and shapes that would characterise the Nickelodeon aesthetic started out in Milan. For a child growing up in the late eighties and nineties we were being encouraged to occupy the same liberal dreamworld that our parents generation had imagined for themselves. Our dream bedrooms were modelled on their fantasy living rooms. 

Perhaps because her friend and neighbour shared my first name I always liked Clarissa Explains it All. Her bedroom was full of unbelievable clutter. Posters, signs, technology (she had her own computer!) hub caps, science experiments, clothes.  Initial designs for the set were a pretty ordinary pink colour until the show’s creator Mitchell Kriegman instructed his team to paint a black checkerboard design all over the walls in black paint. It is the all-knowing Clarissa who is making the world that she lives in. In her DIY approach to interior design, and her door sign with a picture of her irritating brother behind a red circle and diagonal cross to banish him, she has created the ideal room for an aspiring teenager. This is confirmed by the fact that her friend Sam appears through the window on the top of a ladder accompanied by the sound of a guitar. She decides how people come in and out and she decides how her room is designed. 

Clarissa Darling was a tech entrepreneur; she designed her own computer games and pre-empted vlogging with her straight to camera commentaries. She seems to live by a determined belief in the radical politics of private ownership. It was all within her power, and this was the world that those watching were to aspire to. I feel certain that Clarissa grew up to be a managing director of a medium sized marketing agency, or a copywriter for a noughties internet bank. 

I really wanted an inflatable armchair. It would allow me to live like an adult, like Clarissa Darling. It was not my parents who represented sophisticated living, because who in their right minds would forgo the opportunity to own a miniaturised television and a lava lamp? Aged ten, I was certain that my future would be lived in a soft play obstacle course-turned-apartment. There would be mini-fridges containing juice soft drinks and there would be no bedtime. My friends would arrive through the window, and with booby traps and ingenuous ruses we would subject adults to constant revenge. 

This is what it meant to have an identity, to be autonomous, with nothing but wealth and freedom ahead this was what the future was supposed to be like. The bedrooms that were designed for children by television producers and set designers were captivating, not because they were the product of the dream of a child, but because they were an adult’s dream of life unencumbered by responsibility.   

Sam Johnson-Schlee is a writer and academic. He published a book called Living Rooms with Peninsula Press in 2022. He writes a newsletter on Substack called Sifting and Sorting.