Rooms to Grow : Decorator Antonio Torrice allows children to plan their bedrooms, and parents say youngsters’ attitudes improve.

So satisfied was 20-month-old Aaron Bellings with the work of his interior decorator thatfor months he would excitedly toddle to greet visitors to his San Francisco home. “Come see nice, nice,” he would implore as he tugged them toward his bedroom.

Similarly proud of their newly decorated space, 6-year-old Mathew Nagel and 3-year-old Gregory, of Burlingame, would dash for the dust pan and broom to clean up any accidental mess they or their parents made.

When his drab beige room sprouted into a color-garden of greens, then-preschooler Brian Barrios, of Valencia, startled his family by shedding his reticence and conquering a persistent stutter.

All four clients have enjoyed the services of California interior decorator Antonio Torrice, whose Burlingame-based firm, Living and Learning Environments, has found a niche in the nation’s design business by working for children.

Trained in pediatric psychology, Torrice espouses a design philosophy that has little to do with Bart Simpson sheets and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Children, not parents, he believes, should decide the what’s, where’s and how’s of decorating their rooms.

In creating their own living spaces, children enhance their self-esteem and accelerate their development. The results can be immediately evident, with children altering their habits, attitudes and even improving their physical well-being.

In a simple design approach, Torrice categorizes a child’s decorating needs into the areas of color, choice and convertibility. Colors have a therapeutic effect, he says, and should be chosen by the child, who will naturally satisfy his or her physiological requirements. The room also should be sophisticated and flexible enough to serve the child virtually from the crib to the teen-age years with minimal cost after an initial $2,000 to $4,000 expense, which includes Torrice’s decorating fee.

Last year, Torrice published his ideas in the book, “In My Room: Designing for and With Children,” co-authored with Ro Logrippo, a Bay Area design journalist who has become his partner.

In a statement accompanying the book, child psychologist and author Lee Salk touts Torrice’s views as “an enormous contribution to the mental health of children.”

Selina Guber, a psychologist and director of Childrens Market Research in New York, which organizes focus groups to determine children’s likes, also stresses that youngsters should be involved in refurnishing projects: “The room is their security. They don’t want things changed suddenly. It could be very upsetting for them.”

Working out of an office loft, appointed with such props as giant crayons, Torrice, a bouncy 39-year-old, is busily translating such views into a cottage industry.

Last spring, he launched a line of stackable, convertible furniture, called Environmental Teen Concepts, for Child Craft, a major manufacturer of children’s furniture. And he is readying an educational design exhibit, featuring talking furniture, which is scheduled to tour children’s museums next year.

Awarded the American Society of Interior Designers Human Environment Award in 1985, Torrice also is working on a self-initiated study of the country’s child-care sites, which will be presented in a report next spring to Secretary of Education Lauro F. Cavazos.

His approach to decorating, which he promotes in lectures to groups of student and professional designers, is tailor-made for small clients. Called in by their parents, Torrice nevertheless heads straight for the youngest members of the family. He sits on the floor with them in their rooms and gets to know the world as they see it.

He asks them about their hobbies and the subjects they like best in school, and he listens to their concerns about falling out of bed and the scary things that might jump out of the closet at night.

Drawing “word maps” with a black marker on a brown grocery bag, Torrice places the room’s elements where the child indicates. And, unlike obstinate parents, he never says no outright, even when clients tell him they want a roller coaster in their rooms.

“Their being in charge is an important message,” says Torrice. “They see so much on TV that says, ‘You’re out of control.’ But in their room, they’re in charge.”

Countering parents who think their tots are too tiny to know what they want, Torrice believes they express themselves both freely and firmly. “They’re not biased toward what Calvin Klein tells them to wear,” he says, adding: “My highest ratio of success is with 2- to 5-year-olds.”

The problem lies with the big people, Torrice says. “Parents like to build rooms for their children as rooms they never had themselves--the racing car bed with the basketball wallpaper for my son and the frilly canopy bed for my daughter. They are often adult visions of what a child would like.”

As a result, he says, parents tell him, “ ‘I buy all these wonderful things for my kid. Why is my kid’s room always a mess?’

“ ‘Well, really it’s not his or her room. It’s your room,’ ” Torrice replies.

Torrice first discovered how important a room can be for a child while working toward his bachelor of arts degree in child development and special education at Villanova University. In conjunction with his academic courses, he lived for a time with a group of emotionally disturbed children at the Devereux Foundation, a privately funded treatment center outside Philadelphia.

“Getting them to talk about their feelings was the biggest chore of all,” he recalls. However, the children easily volunteered information about their rooms at home, how they hated the bedspread or didn’t have space for their belongings.

Reading about the effects of the environment on young children, Torrice discovered the theories of light absorption by organisms put forth by Seymour Kirlian, a Russian who developed the photographic technique that captures auras and human energy.

According to Kirlian photography, certain colors are related to specific areas and conditions of the human body. Observing how children were attracted to primary and secondary colors, Torrice found that those with speech problems chose green, hearing was related to blue, the brain to purple, physical mobility to red, the lungs and chest to yellow, and circulation and the nervous system to orange.

At the Devereux Foundation, he tested children over a two-year period in rooms colored to fit their needs. He found that their school grades and diets improved.

“By choosing a color that they felt was the color for them, they were supplying themselves with what they needed,” he says.

After graduation in 1973, Torrice headed for the West Coast, ready to put his nesting theories into practice.

Instead, he found himself in a rent-paying post as stock boy for the home accessories shop Design Research in San Francisco, moving the display artist’s ladder around. Using his lessons in color psychology, Torrice began arranging coffee mugs, blouses and pots and pans in ways that augmented sales and earned him the position of national display director.

He hit on the idea of designing for children in 1979, when he decorated a suite of rooms in a designer display house for the former San Francisco firm Lenore Linens. His approach was to decorate a bedroom, bath and dressing room based on what the company president’s young daughter, Allison, told him she wanted.

Ever since then, Torrice has been listening to children and devising ways to make them feel at home in their rooms.

To visually reduce the space to a child’s perspective, he stops wall color about a hand’s length above the child’s head and rims it with bright stick-on border decorations. Wall clocks are placed low enough for tots to read, and books and toys sit on shelves they can easily reach.

Says Terry Nagel of her sons’ new room: “You feel like the giant in Gulliver’s Travels when you walk in.”

Torrice doesn’t question his clients’ choices of color, and cautions parents that even babies know their minds.

For instance, Aaron Bellings, who had not yet learned to walk, had to crawl three times to a purple carpet sample (normally Torrice has children choose from colored cards), before his parents, Terry, a lawyer, and David, a real estate executive, were convinced he knew what he wanted.

When a child asks for a roller-coaster, Torrice gently explains that it might block the door “and you can’t get out for dinner and your friends can’t come in to visit.” But he puts it on the list: “You’re giving the child the acknowledgement that all ideas are valuable.”

To study the effects of such room elements as color, space, light and texture on young children, Torrice has been traveling to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where a day-care center, equipped with one-way mirrors, serves as a control test environment.

When a shed was built in the observation room, researchers found that children working inside the structure progressed more rapidly with creative projects such as modeling clay than they did in the open-space plan used at most day-care sites.

“Things are in scale to them,” Torrice says, adding of the shed concept, “that’s why kids often want to put their beds in the closet.”

In the pediatric playroom he designed for Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, Torrice’s cheerful colors “bring the normal world into the hospital,” says Debra Monzack, a child-life specialist at the hospital. “It sends a strong message to the families that we expect the kids to come in and play and be active as much as possible and not stay in their beds. That is very valuable.”

Private clients also say Torrice’s designs have had a beneficial influence on their children.

“After Brian’s room was changed, there was a difference. He had been quiet and was having a real problem with his speech. It really seemed to help,” says his mother, Pamela Barrios, who has been an interior decorator for five years and utilizes Torrice’s design concepts.

In the two years since the Nagel boys’ room has been redecorated, they have kept it much neater than they did before. “I kind of laughed,” Terry Nagel, a researcher of specialized books, admits when Torrice said he was going to create “a cleaning center,” pegging a dust broom and pan on the bedroom wall. But now, she admits: “They feel very powerful being able to clean up their own messes.”

Perhaps the most difficult adjustment is for adults, who must learn to respect their child’s new domain.

Aaron’s first act in his decorated room was to re-arrange his toys, which Torrice had placed on the shelves in a designerly fashion. When Nagel restored their former order, Aaron once again shifted them to suit himself.

“Finally,” says Nagel, “I realized it was his room and I left it alone.”