Rooms to Grow

Published 3:29 pm Friday, July 2, 2010

Growing pains in Amber Lee’s Inverness home required a real remedy in the form of professional decorating skills.

When Amber’s daughters, Savannah and Abigail, grew tired of their brightly-colored tween bedrooms, Amber called in the help of reDesign Furniture Consignment’s in-house decorator Dixie Luke.

“They were just growing out of their rooms,” Amber said. “It was obvious we were all ready for a change.”

Dixie talked with the girls about color choices, fabric options and accessories. She even showed them project boards with style options.

Then she went shopping.

Her aim was to use quality consignment pieces and distinctive touches in each room.

Savannah Lee, 14, wanted to move far away from her past color scheme.

“My other room was hot pink and very girly,” Savannah said. “I’m going to high school this year, so I wanted a room that was more mature. What I had didn’t match my style.”

Amber said Savannah has always had a vintage style. She said she’s combined the style with a love for entertaining her friends and photographing everything they do.

So, Dixie painted an accent wall a deep garnet with a unique paint technique. The black and white bedspread and accents pull in Savannah’s personality. The new corkboards will allow the teenager to document her experiences at Oak Mountain High.

“This is what I feel is Savannah,” Amber said. “She’s a real clean, classic kind of girl and that’s what the room is – clean and classic.”

Abigail was way past her pastel purple walls too. She didn’t want the same classic look her sister sought, yet she wanted to shed the room’s cutesy feel.

“It was too little-girlish,” Abigail said. “I had all of these flowers and butterflies.”

Even in the “little girl’s” room Abigail transitioned from there were unique accents scattered around, Dixie said. So, she took inspiration from those items.

“Abigail likes a little funk, so I didn’t want to keep it too traditional,” Dixie said. “That’s where the different animal prints and hints of bright color come in.”

Dixie painted Abigail’s room a deep crme color but painted the ceiling with a pop of mint green, pulling in the unexpected youthfulness of Abigail’s personality. The paint choices, Dixie said, makes it easy for the room to grow with Abigail too.

Amber said any parent of teenagers knows having two getting ready in the same spot each morning can become troublesome, so she’s elated to see each girl with their own personal vanity. The vanities also double as great spaces to complete homework in the afternoons.

Amber said these new, more mature rooms offer yet another benefit. If the family has guests in town, the rooms’ queen beds offer extra sleeping space.

Amber said she and the girls didn’t know where to begin on their own.

“Sometimes its hard to let go of the old when you don’t have a vision of the new, but Dixie helped us find that,” Amber said.

It took Dixie six weeks to complete both rooms, but Dixie and Amber’s design relationship began in 2005. Since, she’s redesigned multiple rooms including a man’s room for Amber’s husband, John, who is a big game hunter.

Dixie said she enjoys helping her customers create homes they love to live in as much as homes they love to look at.

Discover more about reDesign Furniture Consignment by calling 408-2601 or by visiting Redesignbham.com.