Room gave two interior-design teams $250 and asked them to make over two rooms at the new Campus Village at Auraria building, which opens to students for the first time Friday. The results reflect each designer’s style but also respect the standard leasing rules regulating most campus residence halls: no candles, no nails, no halogen lights, no live trees. Auraria’s student housing office will raffle off the two decorated rooms to a select group of students, but only after readers of The Denver Post weigh in on their favorite “pimped-out” dorm room. So vote for your favorite room today by calling 303-820-1329. We’ll accept call-in votes through Sunday, then tell you who won in next week’s Room section. The winning design team will receive dinner for two at the restaurant of their choice.|ELANA ASHANTI JEFFERSON
BAMBOO, LANTERNS CREATE A COOL ASIAN HANGOUT
By building on the concepts outlined in her “Digs a Go-Go” instructional bedroom makeover DVD for teens and tweens, award-winning Denver interior designer Lane Elisabeth Oliver conceived a clean, contemporary, Asian-inspired hangout in this dorm room.
Oliver says the biggest challenge – besides a tight deadline and an even tighter budget – was creating a multifunctional space in a tiny room with an abundance of furniture. Because painting the walls was not allowed, Oliver and her assistant set out to “bring life to the room with fabrics, accessories and a new room arrangement.” They lowered the beds to create more living space, aligned them toward the back of the room and put a square ottoman between them. They also hung bamboo curtains between the desks and sleeping area for added privacy. A bamboo-pattern rug, tie-dye lamp and overhead paper lanterns helped round out the look. Oliver’s advice for residence-hall decorating: “Start with the bedcover,” she says. “This will help to establish your style and colors to build on.”
“WE LOVE COLOR, AND WE LOVE PATTERN”
Rearranging the dorm room furniture was the first task for mother-daughter design team and home staging experts Audrey Coggeshall and Brinley Kelly. Their goal?
To create a sense of space separation so that each occupant might have as much privacy as possible.
“I really believe that furniture has to be in the right place, and you go from there,” Coggeshall says. “You can have the rattiest piece of furniture, but put it in the right place, under the right light, and the room comes alive.”
And the best way to find that perfect furniture placement: trial and error.
Coggeshall and Kelly opted to put the two desks on opposite sides of their dorm room. They broke up the space even more by arranging the two beds in a T-shape and then stacking the two dressers. From there, it was all about bold color and fun patterns – including inexpensive, festive party decorations used as wall art.
“We tried to go back and remember how I wanted it to be when I walked into my dorm room,” says Kelly, a 28-year-old University of Northern Colorado alum.
“Knowing you have three hours of studying ahead of you, you just don’t want to walk into a dark, drab room.”
