Relax in Lux Cassidy's eclectic attic bedroom from Life Unexpected

Head into the Cassidy attic and you'll be in for a surprise.

Attic bedrooms can sometimes seem like the short end of the stick. The highest room in the house, it’s hidden away from view with sloping ceilings and those pesky slanted windows. However it’s not all doom and gloom up in the roof as Lux Cassidy (Britt Robertson) finds out in new CW show, Life Unexpected.

Teenager Lux has spent most of her life in foster care, being shunted from family to family and when her 16th birthday rolls around she decides she’s had enough – she’s ready to go solo. She takes the bold step to become an emancipated minor only to find she has to get the signatures of her birth parents to finalise the process. This introduces her to her overgrown frat boy father, Nate ‘Baze’ Bazile (North Shore’s Krisoffer Polha) and her radio host mother, Cate Cassidy (Roswell’s Shiri Appleby), but Lux’s plan is thrown out the window when the ruling judge decides she’s not ready for such independence and awards joint custody to Baze and Cate.

This announcement forces the threesome to become a makeshift family of sorts, one complicated by Baze and Cate’s history (they were never a couple, it was just a one-night stand at their Winter Formal), Cate’s new fiancé, Ryan Thomas (Final Destination’s Kerr Smith) and the fact that this belated stab at family unity is kinda hard for a teen to get their head around. Yet if there’s one perk to putting down roots with her fledgling family – it’s the chance to design her bedroom from scratch.

Lux moves into Cate’s attic in the show’s second episode, “Home Inspected” and soon sets about giving it her distinctive, personal touch. The painted walls are a light blue/ grey shade given some colour through her posters and pictures (not your usual teen movie or cheesy pop star posters but artier with a Rolling Stone magazine cover poster of Spin Doctors) neatly displayed overlapping each other. And the attic nature of the room is always played up rather than fought against, particularly with the end walls. Rather than be painted in the same subtle shade of pale blue, the natural brown of the wood panelling is exposed – left raw and untreated it lends an earthy, lived-in feel to the room.

And being an attic room, light is sparse. There is a window at one end and a pretty purple stained glass window at the opposite and, situated above Lux’s double bed, it practically glows bathing the room in gorgeous colours. Though it’s not warding off the darkness single-handedly, as Lux also has oriental-inspired paper lanterns, a funky chandelier and, proving perhaps the most popular of all her furnishings, her bong lamp. So popular in fact that the show’s creator, Liz Tigelaar is already being quizzed on it, spilling the gos on how it came to be.

“In episode two we wanted something that had been inappropriate in Baze’s house,” she reveals. “We wanted it to end up in Lux’s room so that even though she lived with Cate he was part of her life. So we just started brainstorming what are things that could be in a guy’s loft that would be inappropriate but not so bad and we were like, ‘a bong lamp’. It was so fun because when I came on the set on my schedule was: 12:15 bong lamp meeting. I was like, ‘This is the best job.’”

“I got to look at all these different bongs and all these different lampshades. We had it as a story point in later episodes and I was like, ‘If this doesn’t clear and get past standards and practices, we are screwed’. We were very lucky it did. Lux goes through a lot of changes throughout the season. One thing that’s consistently with her is her bong lamp.”

Constant friend though it might be, there are plenty of other furnishings that really catch the eye in Lux’s bedroom as well as the bong lamp. The Corolla Area rug with its blushed bright scarlet flower petals gives the pale carpet a colourful counterpart, this heat echoed in the beaded red wall hanging, the pink throw headboard and the matching lid bin, while a cooler note is struck thanks to the blue futon and mismatched sapphire throw pillows.

But what really gives the room it’s lived-in, authentic feel is its casual, not-too-fussy attitude. Everything’s mismatched and un-coordinated; nothing’s too fancy or formalised. There are all sorts of colours, fabrics and inspirations on show, from the eastern spirit of the aforementioned lamps to the girly grandeur of the chandelier, the modern minimalism of her IKEA swivel chair to the vintage vanity table and because there’s no overall scheme it all works. There are some recurring touches, such as butterflies (her bedding and her curtain rail), yet it’s the disharmony that brings the charm, warmth and believability.

It feels like a real room and we sure wouldn’t mind hanging out there sometime soon.