The Soul-Crushing Sameness of Today’s Dorm Décor

From Milk Crates to Monograms

A dorm room in the Josephine Louise House at Tulane University in 1901. At least when I was there, we no longer needed to bring mosquito netting. Photo: Tulane University Archives

My freshman dorm at Tulane in the 80s: a room in an odd corner of the Josephine Louise Hall called “The Deep,” where a handful of scholarship students had the privilege of living in singles. My decor: milk crates for storage and a plank of wood with concrete blocks for books. A small fridge and cassette tape player with Neil Young’s “Crazy Horse” on a whiny loop my greatest luxuries. My walls were littered with the most recent local concert posters, The Neville Brothers or The Radiators, I repurposed from telephone poles.

Sophomore year I lived in a double suite in a 1960s two-story building that looked like a motel— it has long since been demolished, and rightly so. An angular, utilitarian space with room for our beds, desks and a communal bathroom connecting us to our suitemates. My junior year abroad at The University of Kent in Rutherford Hall my spare concrete walled room was so depressing my friend, who was in Paris, bought me a purple Indian tapestry to give the gray scratchy wool bedspread some life. The only other color in the room: my orange spined Penguin classics for 19th century lit.

My senior year I moved into a basement apartment of a fabulous three-story mansion off Saint Charles Avenue. I eventually moved to the second floor with tall windows, wooden floors, high ceilings and a tiny, makeshift kitchen. A breeze rustled through the rooms as the streetcar clanked by. But again, as far as furniture and amenities, I hauled an antique twin bed and and old dresser from home, painted them a god-awful blue, and crowded the dresser with countless perfume bottles: Polo, Opium, Patchouli, Oscar de la Renta, Poison, White Shoulders, Chloe, Gucci, Giorgio. That was about it for décor and clearly where any disposable income went.

Three decades later, when my son Clint went to college on the West Coast, I was spared the pressure of creating the perfect dorm room. He didn’t care, and we furnished his space in one Target run when we arrived. The next year, Clint lived in a dorm that should have been condemned. Every year, the administration said this was the year that the building would be demolished to build a new dorm, but it never was. In the meantime, students like Clint suffered at the hands of a malfunctioning HVAC system. But his uncomfortable room built character and made him appreciate when he did have somewhere nicer to live.

When my daughter Frances started college, my aspirational self fell in step with the current trends, and we bought the matching bedding to make sure she was just like everyone else—I did stop short of monogramming the clear Lucite trashcan. But the headboard has yet to work in any dorm room, the curtains were never the right size, and the dust ruffles just got in the way.

Frances ordered what she wanted online and created her own lovely sense of style that was far more interesting than the cookie-cutter, soul-crushing sameness of the well-healed interior designer look that has dominated the freshman experience across campuses, especially southern ones, for many years now.

Is this excessive standard of dorm living parental overreach? A well-intentioned attempt to show what good parents do to make their children comfortable and successful? To ensure that there is no messiness, discomfort, mystery, mistakes or evolution that defines college life one would hope for.

Does it make any sense for college kids to have such an extravagant sensibility with their Club Med living choices, and then graduate to a much lower standard of living? What’s wrong with a clean well-lit, safe space that’s an expression of a student’s individuality?

Maybe this dorm trend frustrates me because the high cost of this type of decorating makes it the purview of the privileged few. To hire a dorm room designer can cost $10,000, according to a NYT article last year. Or maybe it’s because, as a parent, I’ve always fallen short of whatever the trend is for my children. I attempted to match the glossy catalogue or magazine spreads, and now social media image, of what our lives are supposed to look like, but something goes awry as far as achieving expectations. A bit wonky even.

Part of my befuddlement at this phenomenon of matching bed linens, mass-produced art, table lamps with fancy shades and flawless selfies tucked next to oversized books you see on coffee tables is even if I wanted to simulate this smooth illusion, my children always resisted my attempt to define their personalities, their choices and their futures. Their rooms reflected their evolving identity, interests and passions. Their rooms reflected their superimposed view of the world. Not mine.

When I see posts of perfect dorm rooms exuding perfect order, I see a dorm room that’s a potential reflection of an overprotective mother, not a daughter given free rein to start designing the contours of her own life. Or even worse, a freshman who never considered decorating outside the current prescriptive norm.

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