When you share a bedroom with a sibling you’re not too bothered about privacy, well, that is until you start growing hair down there or get tired of their taste in music/jokes/conversation or maybe just their lack of personal hygiene.

I shared a bedroom with my brother until I was in my teens when our parents moved up a rung to a quiet leafy terrace by the edge of a river. We then got rooms of our own. He was older so had first dibs and unselfishly picked the larger of the two. I got the six by ten study-cum-nursery-cum-guest room which still had some of its old yellow wallpaper of puppy dogs and cats and orange-winged butterflies.

Like every other brat, I soon covered the walls with posters and photographs and newspaper clippings—just like the kinda stuff youngsters keep on their smartphones today. I was under the mistaken belief I was expressing some unacknowledged aspect of my personality rather than just giving free advertising to rich people who didn’t really need it.

Yes, I was young and I was foolish (and probably far too serious for my own good) but I had a space to call my own. Just like these young boys and girls from the 1980s, who’ve got their rooms and their posters and growing sense of who they’re maybe going to be.
 

 

 

 
More teens in their rooms, after the jump…
 

 
The artist Eduardo Paolozzi once described the artist’s studio as a laboratory where experiments are carried out and chemicals react with each other to produce strange and unsteady alliances. A place where the artist’s personality spreads through the room’s collected detritus like some untreated fungal growth and creativity changes dramatically but generally for the better.

The same observation can be said for the teenager’s bedroom which is a similar site of experimentation and chemical reaction towards a creative sense of self. The teenage bedroom is where the revolution usually first starts between slammed doors and “You don’t understand me,” to music blaring at all hours of the day-and-night and the unrelenting desires of puberty.

These rooms tend to all end up looking the same with only the allegiances to content differing. The walls are usually decorated like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a collage of posters featuring the fashionable pop star, movie actor, and sexy pin-up. While the books and albums which spread across shelf and floor suggest a search for taste and substance. This little selection of photos culled from here and there give a rather personal peek at the typical teenager’s life (and taste in interior design) from the early 1960s to late 1980s.
 

 

 
More ‘imperial’ bedrooms, after the jump…