Lydia marks

If the Goldenblatt girls' shared room from Sex and the City 2 has inspired you to change your children's lair, we've got tips for the transition! You don't need Charlotte's Park Avenue bank account to achieve the sophisticated, yet lived in look. When we chatted with the movie's set designer, Lydia Marks, she gave us tricks for achieving the look on a more realistic budget.

According to Marks, mixing high and low design objects is easy on the wallet and makes a bold impression. She also recommends:

• Create grouped displays. "Display pieces, even if they’re toys or some inexpensive dollar store [item], if they have a great shape or a fun color and you can group like objects together. A lot of what we did on the shelves wasn’t from high end stores, it was from really great shapes and pieces and figures, and it tends to work really nicely in a kid's room."
• Search your home for treasures you may already own. "Mixing the new with the old works really well in a kid's room."
• Look beyond traditional children's stores. "I like using light fixtures that aren’t usually meant for children. Whether that’s a little chandelier on a small scale, or a funky lamp. It's fun to mix in pieces like that including an area rug – or a Tibetan rug with great colors – it doesn’t have to be made for children. I think that really helps to make the room more sophisticated, but still work within a color palette."

For more SATC design inspiration, check out CasaSugar's coverage of the decor throughout the film.

Photo courtesy of: Warner Bros.

Space is limited in New York even for the Sex and the City kids! Charlotte's daughters Lily and Rose Goldenblatt have to bunk up in the latest film, but close quarters encourage lots of sisterly bonding! We loved Lily's pink lair (pictured above) in the first movie and recently chatted with Lydia Marks, the SATC set decorator, about her thoughts on the new shared space.

BabySugar: Two years have passed since the first film, how did the room evolve?
Lydia Marks: The two girls [now] share a bedroom, so they had to have a new room in this film. We had to fit two twin beds into the room and then set dressing and character dressing for both ages of girls. We had the liberty, because of the time change, to change the decoration. We also had the liberty because [Rose] moved into a baby bed in the same room as her sister.

BabySugar: What was the inspiration for Lily and Rose's room, and what did you use to try to achieve it?
Lydia Marks:We needed the room to be very bright in color and filled with personality . . . because the bathroom was very white. We wanted to mix the really modern pieces with the really classic pieces, sort of like Charlotte did in the rest of her apartment. So we used beautiful bed linens, very traditional bed linens, and then Vitra bookshelves across from the bed that had different color Plexiglas doors on it, so it was really modern. So we tried to do a lot of that kind of mixing, that was one of our goals.

BabySugar: How did you include the girls' diverse backgrounds in the room?
Lydia Marks: In the first movie we had a whole doll collection. We wanted this collection to be an attempt for Charlotte to educate her daughter about all different ethnicities and being inclusive. So we continued that theme in this room. On the Vitra shelves there was a huge mix of fabulous objects and stuffed animals from all different places, different ethnicity dolls, and little sculptural toys. So we did it mostly with dolls and also with the wallpaper. [It] had a little bit of an Asian theme to it — a paper lantern border.

To see which brands Lydia used to decorate the room, read more