Designer Residences Coming to DC

For Amanda Capon, a freshman at the University of Maryland, furnishing her dorm room wasn’t a last-minute task. She started following dorm-room design trends on Instagram and TikTok as a sophomore in high school, taking screenshots for inspiration. Designer headboards. Custom curtains. Coastal influences. After deciding earlier this year to head to College Park, her chef father, Josh Capon’s alma mater, the time finally came. She met her future Maryland roommate for dinner in New York City, where they brainstormed ideas for their room. “We wanted something light and simple,” she recalls. “Some people do things that are too colorful, and when you walk in, it’s too in your face.”

They settled on ice blue as the primary color, and their design took shape from there. In early June, they ordered matching headboards, nightstands, and other accessories from Dormify, a leading dorm-room-decor retailer. And on move-in day in August, their families helped them assemble their signature statement piece: ice-blue neon signs spelling out each of their names. “Everyone loved the room,” Capon said a few weeks later. “Even the kids were fascinated.”

If you’re not of college age or a parent of one, you may have missed the viral rise of dorm room design. Inspired by room teasers on social media, many students have adopted organizing their spaces as an essential college ritual. Some families are paying $10,000. The movement, which began largely in the South—Alabama, Mississippi—has now spread across the country and reached D.C. Decorilla, an online interior design company, has managed a handful of projects at Howard University this year (clients wish to remain anonymous). And the D.C. area is one of Dormify’s top five markets, according to the company’s co-founder Amanda Zuckerman.

In 2009, when Zuckerman, who grew up in Potomac, was furnishing his freshman room at Washington University in St. Louis, he struggled to find twin-XL bedding and other dorm-specific decor. “I remember standing in Bed Bath and Beyond with my mom and thinking, ‘Oh, I’m a little bit of a bitch.’ Why isn’t there a brand dedicated to college students??” The Zuckermans founded the company in 2011, the same year the word “dormify” was added to the urban lexicon (definition: “to decorate your living space with cool, on-trend, hip fashion”).

Post-pandemic, the trend has reached new heights, similar to the awesome headboards students are choosing. Zuckerman attributes some of the momentum to TikTok revelations; Joyce Huston, director of sourcing at Decorilla, points to the excitement of returning to campus after Covid lockdowns and families repurposing unused vacation money they saved during the pandemic.

“I never would have imagined it would grow this much in the last four years,” Eden Bowen Montgomery says of her dorm design business, Essentials with Eden. She founded the company in 2020 while she was a marketing major at Ole Miss and now has more than 72,000 Instagram followers, ships her decorating line to 43 states, offers consulting services, and recently designed a dorm room at George Washington University.

The prevailing style among students? The beachside aesthetic (a trend that largely skews toward younger women), according to Zuckerman: “It’s not beachy in a kitsch way. It’s beachy in a Hamptons kind of sophisticated way. So rattan, leathers, light woods.” More recently, a cowboy/Western aesthetic has emerged that reflects mainstream fashion trends, and a hybrid style has emerged: “beachy cowgirl,” which has brought the ranch to the coast, to the campus. Of course, there’s a pragmatic side, too: Best-selling Dormify products include charging carts and headboards with built-in plugs, because keeping your phone charged is a must.

The rise of a dorm-industrial complex has, unsurprisingly, sparked a backlash, as some critics might say. Is it really necessary to spend a significant amount of money on something with such a fleeting half-life? Dawn Thomas, founder of After Five Designs in Jackson, Mississippi, has been furnishing dorm rooms for nearly two decades, since she designed her daughter’s (she designed a room at George Washington last year). Thomas admits that things have become overly competitive, with each incoming class trying to outdo the last; she blames TikTok for that. But she thinks some critics miss the mark and overlook the convenience factor for many clients: For some projects, she manages the furniture delivery and the room set-up on move-in day, giving out-of-state parents a sense of security as they drop off their students. “This is the next phase of homemaking,” she says. “Kids are leaving their homes, and they want their rooms to feel comfortable, like home.”

For Patrick Mele, an interior designer in Greenwich, Connecticut, freshman year is also a turning point for students: “It’s the first time you can express yourself creatively or aesthetically outside of your own family home. It’s a time to experiment and be creative.” He recently gave a Georgetown University student a few suggestions for her dorm room design (her parents are clients; he designed her childhood bedroom): “light green nonstick wallpaper that evokes a peaceful meadow, shades of green and blue, a fabric drape sewn over the lighting to look like a kite, and plenty of Serena & Lily home accessories.” Urban and Rural It was reported. But as he said WashingtonMele prefers that students go it alone, trusting their own design instincts and sourcing supplies from flea markets, Goodwill, their parents’ garages. (Pro tip: sarongs, scarves, tablecloths—all can be pinned up to create a colorful vibe and offset the deadly glare of fluorescent lighting.) To ensure that students aren’t being transported into depressing concrete boxes that have the character of a morgue, Mele argues that universities should work with interior designers.

For Capon, designing his Maryland room has had benefits beyond just aesthetics. It’s given him a chance to bond with his roommate, and their families have had a chance to meet as they work on the staging. His room has already become a hangout for his friends; they turn on their neon signs at night, giving the space “a more welcoming vibe.”

There’s an added benefit, Capon says: “The fact that the room is so on-trend motivates us to clean more.”