3 min readLook at a dorm room as a blank canvas. The cinderblocks and thin mattresses may not seem that inspiring, but take it from the design lovers on HB’s team. There’s plenty you can do to make it feel personal and polished. So we decided to put together a guide to transforming a dorm room without incurring the ire of your RA. There are plenty of decor swaps you can make that make it feel like a home, instead of just the place you sleep at night.
For this tasteful guide to dorm room decor, we spoke with everyone from seasoned interior designers to actual college students (majoring in interior design!) and their design-savvy parents. Their tips can help turn even the most basic dorm room into a space that feels like a chic studio apartment. You’ll find snapshots of their own inviting dorm rooms, plus links to the pieces they used, so you can get the look for yourself. Transforming a dorm from boring to beautifully curated isn’t always easy, but if there’s one thing a design lover can’t resist, it’s a good challenge.
Let Vintage Pieces Show Your Personality
When Jeana Bartroff, who dabbles in interior design as a hobby, moved her daughter into her first college dorm room, she wanted to be sure that it met her criteria: It had to reflect her daughter's personality, and it needed to be beautiful. "She wanted color and pattern like she had seen in Copenhagen the winter before," Bartroff explains. "She’s a happy yet quirky person, so my goal was to communicate that through the design."
She managed to accomplish her mission the only way any designer would: by incorporating vintage pieces. "By adding vintage pieces (nothing too precious), mixing pattern and texture, and staying away from all things plastic, we created a dorm that felt like a slice of home for her."
The key to achieving this one-of-a-kind look? Being open to finding inspiration in surprising places. "I wouldn’t say we invested in art, but we did find a cute, old, mid-20th-century Doris Day movie poster on Etsy, and we used the colors in the poster as a starting point."
Stick to a Serene Color Palette
Dorm rooms are as blank a canvas as it gets, so you have free rein to infuse your personal style into the space as much or as little as you want. The easiest way to do that? Start with a specific color palette.
"Design is something I've always been very passionate about, so when it came to decorating my dorm room, I knew that I wanted a space that could feel like home," says Blair Morrow, a student at LSU studying interior design. "With the chaos of college life, it is important to have a place to relax and recharge. The color palette I chose of blues and greens helps capture a sense of serenity and peace, which was the goal for this space."
Keep Your Posters and Prints Framed
Los Angeles–based designer Olivia Erwin Rosenthal is the founder of Dormie, an online tool where college students can download kits to build the dorm room of their dreams, including links on where to shop everything. Rosenthal is a big fan of incorporating as many sophisticated elements into a dorm room as possible—namely art. "Posters taped to the wall scream 'freshman year,'" she says. "Even affordable prints in simple frames add instant polish. You can use Command hooks to hang them."
