Seventeen-year-old Yara Shahidi has a major TV role on ABC’s Black-ish and college acceptances from Ivy League schools like Harvard under her belt, but at the end of the day, she’s just a normal teenager. And like any teen living at home, she uses her bedroom as a place to relax and unwind, but her old setup wasn’t giving her the right resources. “It was a room just to basically go to sleep in and then wake up and do other things in,” she said.
But thanks to help from online interior design service Laurel & Wolf, Shahidi has a whole new space to use to create. The company used decor from Pottery Barn Teen to give the actress a new room that felt all her own. “Everything about me personally is so unique to who I am and I wanted my room to reflect that. To be able to design my room, I feel like it was a chance to finally have it become more of my space. I’m such a vivid person and I wanted my space to match that,” Shahidi said.
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“I feel like it was about how to utilize the space to the best of my ability. My room is really the center of how I run my personal empire. It’s the center of it—the kingdom and the castle.”
The high school senior, who is taking a gap year before heading to college, now has a redecorated space where she can listen to music with her color-changing lights, have a “mini dance party,” or finish up her homework. “I feel like it’s a more mature Yara than my old space,” she said.
Keep scrolling to get a better look at her new room, and shop the décor for yourself.
The Bed
"I’ve always viewed my room like a visual view of my brain. You can tell when I’m frazzled, my room is frazzled. When I have my life together, my room is perfect. And looking around my room you’ll see how many hobbies and how many interests I have just from the books alone," she said. "Because we’re always in an ever-changing space, and just being in the acting world, I like the fact that my room can be the one nice constant piece."
The Desk
"I also really love the desk as I now have a space to do work. In a given hour it can range from AP Stats to conference calls, so it’s really nice to now have a dedicated space for that," Shahidi said. "I collect antiques—I have a typewriter, a record player and an old-school pencil sharpener in my room. I like the fact that it kind of pays homage to my love of history."
