Children, tweens and teens are giving their parents’ interior designers ideas for projects around the house
5 min
When Abby Tennenbaum, 44, and her husband, Ross Tennenbaum , 46, purchased a $2.1 million vacation property in 2021 about 80 miles southeast of Seattle in the mountain resort community of Suncadia, Washington, they encouraged their two young daughters to collaborate with the family’s interior designer, Emily LaMarque, on decorating the house. The 3,143-square-foot, five-bedroom home had a budget of $500,000 for furnishings and decorating.
The Tennenbaum sisters—Ella, 12, and Edie, 8—gave LaMarque feedback on paint colours and wallpaper patterns, but they also expressed other specific preferences. They weren’t into insect art (though butterflies were okay).
They thought it would be neat to have indoor swings—which the house now has on all three of its levels. And Edie, who has always loved bunk beds, worked with LaMarque to design a bunk room, which is both sisters’ favourite space. “It looks so good and it’s so cool,” Edie says of the sleeping spot that has four full-sized beds.
The girls even convinced their parents, Abby and Ross Tennenbaum, that the kitchen needed a snow cone machine. Abby is an occupational therapist turned stay-at-home mother and Ross is the CFO of Avalara, a tax software company.
Children have long contributed thoughts on their bedroom designs: Pink! Blue! Princesses! Rocket ships! But now they are driving interior decisions around the house. “We’ve always talked with our clients’ children,” says Lynn Stone, co-founder of Hunter Carson Design, which is based in Manhattan Beach, California. “What we are seeing now is something different: Now we expect the kids to get involved.”
Stone and her co-founder, Mandy Gregory, routinely receive emails, Pinterest boards, Instagram messages and TikToks from their clients’ mini-mes. “Kids send us texts if they are out shopping, saying, ‘Do you think this will work in our room?’” Stone says. “One client’s daughter said, ‘Please, don’t meet with Lynn and Mandy without me, and if you do, FaceTime me!’”
A sampling of product requests from their pint-sized clients include CB2’s Goop-designed Gwyneth Boucle Swivel Chair (“Teens love this chair,” Stone says), Gucci wallpaper, Bella Notte handmade linens, customised neon signs, shelves to show off Lego collections and bedroom mini fridges (“Parents often say no to mini fridges,” Stone says). One teenager emailed Stone a screenshot of a Sotheby’s auction artwork in the $20,000 range that she wanted for her bedroom. Stone told her, “I too love this, but I don’t see it making its way into either of our houses.”
In 2021, Stone and Gregory were hired by stay-at-home mom Neeraj Rotondo, 56, to update her son’s bedroom and bathroom in the roughly 5,000-square-foot, five-bedroom Manhattan Beach house where Rotondo’s family had lived for more than a decade. The Mediterranean-style house is currently estimated at $6.2 million, according to Redfin. Rotondo’s son, Sam, who was 14-years-old at the time, gave his opinions: He wanted his room to have a couch-like bed, framed N.B.A. jersey artwork and a space to play card games with friends. The bedroom cost $8,000 and the bathroom was $23,000.
While that project was underway, Neeraj Rotondo’s two daughters, Leena and Kayla Rotondo, who were teenagers, convinced their mother that the family’s unused media room needed a refresh. “It was brown and navy with reclining chairs and super not welcoming,” says Kayla, 19.
Kayla was inspired by a Pinterest photo of reality star Khloé Kardashian ’s theatre room, especially its long, glamorous cream-coloured couch. Stone and Gregory outfitted the Rotondos’ screening room with a custom-built daybed with grey velvet cushioning, floating lounge chairs, fluffy cream pillows and faux fur blankets, shimmery grasscloth wallpaper, hand-blown glass sconces and candy jars. It cost $42,000.
“It was soooo fun that we were young and we got to bring our idea to life,” says Leena, 20. Her sister agrees. “It feels like the only room in the house that was just for me and Leena,” Kayla says. “It wasn’t anyone’s vision but ours.”
Savannah, Georgia-based Khoi Vo , who is the CEO of the American Society of Interior Designers, thinks it’s “wonderful” that youngsters are interested in home design, which gives family members a forum for communicating with each other and thinking about how they live together. “As a dad to a pre-teen, I think any chance a parent can get to engage in dialogue with their kids is an opportunity,” says Vo.
Vo emphasises that families need to recognise an interior design project’s constraints, whether it’s money, time, space, scale or all of the above. “A child might say, ‘I want a turret that I can shoot an arrow out of and a moat with alligators,” he says, noting that, yes, of course it’s okay to say no to the castle.
“If you’re designing a space just for you—you’re the only one who is going to use it—you don’t need to seek your 12-year-old son’s opinion,” Vo says. When it comes to the living room, though, Vo says it’s fine to talk as a family about it—but, that doesn’t mean the son needs the wall of television screens he wants for sports night.
Houston interior designer David Euscher thinks the pandemic made everyone become more aware of how they live in their own environments and how spaces influence behaviour. “Even without that event,” he says, “young people look for ways to exercise some control over their lives, and influencing their parents’ design choices at home is one way to do it,” he says.
In 2022, Wendy Becktold, 53, of Berkeley, Calif., hired local interior designer Nureed Saeed, owner of Nu Interiors, to design a bedroom for her son, Simon. Wendy Becktold, an editor, and her family moved into a roughly 2,400-square-foot, three bedroom 1922 Craftsman house in 2016, which she and her husband purchased for $1.3 million.
“Since I’m the youngest child, when we moved, I obviously got the smallest room,” says Simon, 16, who has an older sister. “For my furniture, I got hand-me-downs from everyone else. It was little-kid, vandalised furniture all around my room. So I leveraged that, and was like, well, mom, I have the smallest room and the worst furniture. Maybe it would be a good idea to get a little room redo. I guess it worked.”
Saeed created image boards featuring varying furniture and colours and she and Simon talked through the selections. He gravitated toward Midcentury Modern shapes, walnut woods and a colour palette of navy, tan, white and black with a hint of greige.
“Definitely more adult than I would have expected out of a 14-year-old,” Saeed says. As his space morphed into his new one with fresh paint, furniture and lighting, Simon says, “It was surreal to watch it become my room after I’d been speculating about how cool it was going to be.”
Once the bedroom project was complete, Saeed moved onto designing the living room and entryway, where Simon expressed his preferences for modern furniture. “I didn’t want to overstep my role as the youngest child,” he says, “but I did definitely say, ‘This is cool,’ ‘This is a good idea,’ ‘I’m not as keen on these things, like a couch.’”
The house project had limits. “We made careful considerations for our interior design selections because it’s quite an investment,” Wendy Becktold says. The bedroom project, for example, cost close to $10,000, but she says it was worth it, as the new space can be useful even after Simon leaves the nest someday.
The Becktolds’ project is an example of how Saeed thinks there has been a societal shift in how children are regarded today. “We view them as their own humans who, even at young ages, their opinions are worth honouring and listening to,” she says.
“It’s not like children sit down buttoned-up for a kick off meeting, but at some point, parents are always like: My kids really like this thing but I don’t know how to integrate it,” says Los Angeles-based Emily LaMarque, founder of an eponymous firm, who designed the Tennenbaum family’s house in Washington.
LaMarque says her recent clients’ offspring often fall into two camps: those who are inspired by nature or music. “There’s a lot of Taylor Swift,” she says, noting that for music fans, it’s less about capturing a specific musician’s aesthetic and more about exuding a vibe—though LaMarque will coordinate album cover posters with other artwork and decor.
One 10-year-old gave LaMarque four iterations of her bedroom floor plan. “Specifically, she said ‘I want a pale wood bed here. I want two nightstands. I want my two guitars to go here. I want a credenza—and I want a record player on it so it needs to be deep enough and I want plants on it.’”
LaMarque riffed back and forth with one 13-year-old drama lover, whose bedroom they decided to outfit with a nook that has curtains that can be tied back so the girl could have a theatre area. LaMarque says, “when she got her new bedding that she had helped pick out, she was literally jumping up and down.”
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As millions flock to GLP-1s, doctors warn the drugs can cause rapid and significant muscle loss.
5 min
Chanel Robinson achieved exactly what the gold rush of blockbuster weight-loss drugs promised: She lost nearly 100 pounds, lowered her cholesterol to normal levels and reined in her polycystic ovary syndrome.
Yet, nearly three years into her journey on Mounjaro, the 30-year-old from Atlanta, Ga., is discovering the hidden costs of the slimmed-down life.
Robinson experiences muscle fatigue daily, feeling physically weak, frail and often cold. Robinson said she experiences bursts of sluggishness sporadically during the day, and has trouble with basic tasks like opening a jar. “It shouldn’t be this difficult,” she said.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Zepbound have been a success for public health and the pharmaceutical companies that make them. Obesity rates are falling, the volume of food consumed in America is declining and retailers report a slump in sales of plus-size apparel. It has improved health and happiness for millions of people.
But for at least some of the 13 million Americans taking them, losing muscle along with fat is an unexpected downside that isn’t broadly discussed or immediately apparent.
The drugs can cause rapid and significant loss of lean muscle mass, up to 10%, comparable to a decade or more of aging, according to an analysis published by the American Diabetes Association.
The loss of lean tissue is similar to weight loss from dieting, but the magnitude over a short period can lead to frailty, instability and lack of coordination, doctors and researchers say. Another concern is that losing muscle could slow down patients’ metabolism, leading to weight regain.
“We are curing obesity by encouraging frailty,” said Daniel Green, principal research fellow at the University of Western Australia, who contributed to the analysis. Many taking weight-loss medications initially lose fat and feel great, but quickly start to feel weak and lethargic, he said.
Green’s research showed that the rate of muscle loss could be slowed significantly by regular strength workouts. “It should say ‘must be taken with resistance training’ on the box,” he said.
Drugmakers say weight-loss drugs should be taken only on the advice of a physician and as part of a long-term plan that includes diet and exercise.
A spokesperson for Eli Lilly, maker of Zepbound, said Food and Drug Administration guidelines say it should be used “with increased physical activity.” The spokesperson added: “Sustainable weight loss is about more than a number on a scale.”
Both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk said clinical trials showed users did lose some lean muscle tissue, though at far lower rates than fat. Liz Skrbkova, a spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk, said that trials for its drug Wegovy showed changes in muscle mass didn’t “significantly differ” from patients who took a placebo. Eli Lilly said users lost three times more fat weight than lean tissue.
Rayna Kingston, 30, from Denver, said her injections of Zepbound left her feeling so tired the following day that she struggled to complete anything other than basic tasks. She said she shifted her dose to a Sunday because Mondays were her least busy day. Her partner would bring her meals in bed because she felt so weak.
She stopped exercising, and said her doctor didn’t give her any guidance on strength training or muscle maintenance. “I was relying on Reddit forums to understand what was happening to my body,” she said. She got so frustrated with the fatigue she came off the medication just under two months later.
Experts say that losing muscle at such a rate can be especially dangerous for those over 50 or with osteoporosis or limited mobility as it could lead to an increased risk of injury. “Loss of muscle mass is detrimental to moving around and quality of life, but it is also not safe,” said Katsu Funai, associate professor at the University of Utah.
Elderly Americans are set to be able to get GLP-1s from Medicare from July.
There is also pushback from doctors and regulators against using weight-loss drugs as a “quick fix” to lose a bit of weight.
People who take GLP-1s regain weight four times faster than those who lose weight through lifestyle interventions, and weight regained is often mostly fat, according to a recent analysis published in the British Medical Journal. There currently are few, if any, guidelines or studies on de-prescribing the drugs, researchers say.
The nurse practitioner who prescribed Robinson the medication didn’t warn her that resistance training is essential to maintaining muscle mass, Robinson said. She said she regrets not exercising and now does Pilates once a week.
In the haste to disrupt the obesity epidemic, weight loss has been treated as the singular, undisputed metric of success, which experts say is problematic.
“People worship body weight as an outcome measure because it’s simple, quick and inexpensive,” said Green. “But what matters is fat and muscle mass, which is more expensive to measure as it requires an MRI.”
Grace Parkin, 34, a property manager from Sheffield, England, has lost 125 pounds after she started taking Mounjaro in 2024. “I don’t care about my muscle mass as long as I’m a healthy weight,” she said.
The doctor who prescribed the drug didn’t tell her to exercise, though the pharmacy that sold the medication gave her information on exercise and protein intake, she said.
She didn’t exercise and said she soon felt side effects: a “deathly cold, from the inside” likely because of the drug. Still, she vowed to keep going, saying the weight loss was worth it.
In response to some of the side effects, drug companies are hoping to develop weight-loss treatments aimed at preserving or even building lean muscle mass.
German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim recently said it had promising results from one such drug. Eli Lilly last September halted a trial of a similar drug.
While weight-loss medications are designed as lifelong treatments for chronic diseases, namely obesity and Type 2 diabetes, they are increasingly marketed as lifestyle fixes.
Tennis superstar Serena Williams, who used GLP-1s to slim down after having children, was featured in this year’s Super Bowl commercial promoting telehealth company Ro’s weight-loss medication.
Serena Williams poses for an ad campaign for a weight-loss drug. Ro/Handout/Reuters
Women may be particularly vulnerable to the drugs’s side effects, which can also include nausea, diarrhea, migraines and rarer cases of pancreatitis.
A study last year from a university hospital in Turin, Italy, showed that women are more prone to adverse reactions to weight-loss drugs than men, including muscle loss.
Green, the researcher, said the issue is of particular concern to those taking GLP-1s recreationally and who don’t have much muscle mass to begin with. Others say a lack of oversight is compounding the issue.
“Patients are self-reporting, and telehealth companies don’t have the patient in front of them to conduct a proper medical assessment,” said Rupal Mathur, an internist in Houston whose practice specializes in weight loss.
She said medical spas are prescribing off-label drugs that don’t meet the criteria set out by the FDA that justify a prescription.
The number of people taking weight-loss drugs who are not living with obesity or Type 2 diabetes is difficult to track since it is unregulated.
However, an analysis by the FDA from 2023 found that more than half of new Ozempic and Mounjaro users didn’t have Type 2 diabetes.
Scientists are calling for more clinical trials to pin down the full effects of weight-loss drugs on muscle loss in different demographics.
“The only studies that have been done have looked at people living with obesity or Type 2 diabetes,” said Green. “That makes it all the more concerning for those using weight-loss drugs in an ad hoc or unregistered way.”
