Why I've had to rethink my childhood dream home

Of all the kids I knew growing up, I was the one least likely to have ended up with terrible taste in houses. My architect father and his builder friend had constructed a modernist doll’s house for me, and I never owned a Barbie playset. I was raised reading the classic picture book, House By Mouse, in which a mouse architect designs mid-century classics for all her animal friends.

And yet, despite all this, my childhood tastes in interior design were, shall we say, less than ideal. It was the design equivalent of the children of committed counterculture metalheads expressing a desire to become chartered accountants. What are you gonna do? Kids dream the darndest things.

So, as I now find myself, at 33, looking back over many things I thought when I was younger (shout out to the brief “I’m going to be a marine biologist!” phase), it feels like the right time to reassess what design features I thought my “dream house” would be populated by.

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1. Chandeliers

Chandeliers – and forget those whoopsy black or red blown glass versions, I’m only interested in their most extravagant and crystal-dripping incarnations – were installed in the house of my dreams when we took a school trip to Como House. They were, to me, the last word in elegance, and given the chance (or a lottery win, given my tastes tend towards the $25,000 end of the spectrum) I would still fill my house with them to this day.

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2. Pierrot Masks

…Then again, I also thought these creepy porcelain decorations were the last word in elegance, particularly if they were decked out with glitter glue and rhinestones. In my mind, every room would have at least one Pierrot mask hung on the wall. The more I think about it, the more I think pre-teen Clem had the interior design tastes of a 75-year-old former Radio City Rockette who retired to Boca Raton. See also:

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3. Airbrush Unicorn Art

Oh boy, I vividly remember the day my parents took me to a poster shop and I was allowed to purchase my first ever “art print”: a huge, glossy poster of two unicorns hanging out in front of a mystical castle. In my mind, this was like a downpayment on the eventual collection of unicorn art that would populate most rooms in the Dream House.

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4. Spa Baths

Actually, my spa bath fascination (due entirely to a school friend’s purchase of the pump-action Barbie hot tub playset) was cut down in its prime in Grade 4, when a teacher told us a story about a woman who had drowned in her spa bath when her hair caught in one of the jets. So in that sense, I had already rethought this particular Dream House feature when I was 10.

Image via: simplywallpaper.net

5. An Avatar Room

Okay, this one I can’t blame on childhood, but when I was 28, I saw Avatar, and dreamed about owning a big enough house that I could dedicate one room to black-lights and fluoro-painted fake plants, so that I could pretend I was on Pandora. In retrospect, it was the sort of thing an eight-year-old would dream up. Look, we all have our things, okay??

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6. IXL Tastics

No jokes: I still get a kick when I enter a bathroom that has one of these mystical light-and-heat ceiling-spaceships installed, so you can imagine my near-apoplectic excitement as a child with a fear of cold and clammy bathrooms. And while I’m sure that for most people the Tastic has been usurped by heated floors and other new-fangled bathroom fixtures, this is one interior design area in which I think my childhood self was right on the money.



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7. Leadlight Windows

When searching my memory for the reason stained glass featured so heavily in my childhood dream home, I settled upon a school excursion to the NGV’s Great Hall and its Leonard French ceiling; the only other inspiration would have been St Joseph’s church in Port Melbourne, and given I avoided it wherever possible, Church’s work was the culprit. Nowadays I’d probably go for a single leadlight lampshade rather than, you know, every single window.

(Oh and for the record, my adult dream house is a mid-century modern joint with lots of glass and exposed beams, preferably in Palm Springs, so I guess all that childhood conditioning sunk in after all.)