Welcome to the Era of the $10,000 Designer Dorm Room
College students hungry for comfort and TikTok acclaim are pouring extra creativity into decorating their living spaces
3 min
Dorm rooms are designed to be utilitarian: 12-by-19 feet of standard-issue furniture and cinder-block walls.
Don’t tell that to today’s college freshmen.
At schools across the country, students are locked in unofficial competitions for who can make their dorms the least dorm like. Some wealthier families are spending hundreds of dollars or more on dormitory décor, even hiring designers. Other students are doing time-intensive DIY projects on the cheap. Some of those efforts culminate in dorm-room-transformation videos that rack up millions of views on TikTok.
The over-the-top rooms are often a collaboration between kids and their parents and stand as a contrast to last year, when many students weren’t allowed to have anyone help them move in at all due to Covid-19 concerns.
University of Mississippi freshmen Ansley Spinks and Taylor Robinson live in one of the most viral examples. The barren “before” and tricked-out “after” TikTok video of their violet-accented room has 3.8 million views and thousands of comments to the tune of, “OMG that looks like a room in a normal house.”
The two women and their moms, who didn’t meet until move-in day, had been sending each other messages since late May. They ordered light-up signs spelling out their names off Etsy, picked out matching bedding and built a virtual 3-D model of the room to workshop layouts, landing on one with a dedicated lounge space for watching TV.
Amber Park, Ansley’s mother, says the eight-hour assembly and roughly $2,000 they spent (that the girls largely funded themselves) is nothing compared with what she’s heard some other moms say they pay.
“It’s a crazy thing, especially in the South,” says Ms. Park, a 48-year-old human-resources consultant who lives in Marietta, Ga.
Dozens of families pay Dawn Thomas of After Five Designs as much as $10,000 to give their kids magazine-worthy rooms. Ms. Thomas has been decorating dorms at schools like the University of Alabama, Ole Miss and UCLA for 19 years. She says this year is different in how much pressure students are putting on themselves to have perfectly Instagrammable rooms. The $1,050 cabinet she designed to camouflage a mini-fridge sold out in a matter of weeks.
“Some days I go, ‘Do people do all this for a picture? Are they doing it for Instagram?’” says Ms. Thomas, who is based in Jackson, Miss. She says she gets effusive thank-you texts from moms when they’re back home for giving their kids a cozy place to live.
For Sydney Hargrove, having a swoon-worthy room is a matter of identity. The 18-year-old sophomore at New York City’s Hunter College says she made a lot of her friends during her freshman year by leaving her door open. This year’s room features a wall-to-wall green shag rug and black-and-white polka dotted peel-and-stick wallpaper.
Some of the two million people who viewed the TikTok of her room have criticised her for investing so much time and money in a space she’s spending less than a year in. She says the effort is worth it—and that she spent a lot less than people think. (About $100 this year and $300 last, she says, which she earned at her summer job working at a New Jersey beach.)
“With all the things going on in the world, there’s so much uncertainty, and New York is a tumultuous place to live, so coming back to this dorm is a form of therapy,” she says.
Allyson Schall, a senior at Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Mount Vernon, Ohio, has done up her dorm every year. She believes this year’s edition takes the cake. As a residential adviser, she wanted to create a space where freshmen on her floor would feel comfortable hanging out.
“It looked like a jail cell in the beginning,” Ms. Schall, 21, says.
She leveraged her summer job at Target to snatch up a $300 midcentury-modern-inspired armchair on sale for $80. She rigged an outdoor lantern to the ceiling using zip ties and command strips for mood lighting.
Her parents were supportive of her passion for interior design—until they had to help unload three cars’ worth of belongings, including a headboard her father built.
Bayla Felton-Jones, a freshman at Elizabeth City State University, in Elizabeth City, N.C., spent days this past summer planning every inch of his “light and airy modern” room. That includes the spacing of the honours certificates above his bed and the fluffy grey welcome mat outside his door.
“I want my college experience to be one I can remember, since I got robbed of high school with Covid, and my room is a part of that,” says Mr. Felton-Jones, 18.
His roommate, Quinn Miller, missed the memo.
Unable to find Mr. Miller on Instagram or Facebook before move-in on Aug. 16, Mr. Felton-Jones hoped for the best. He got pure practicality: blank walls, one pillow and a towel thrown over the end of the bed.
Mr. Miller won’t argue that he’s a minimalist. “I just sleep here pretty much,” says Mr. Miller, 20. “I don’t see a point in spending money on things that I don’t need.”
Mr. Felton-Jones’s friends and parents find the contrast between the two halves of the room hilarious. They tell him that when they walk in, “You first look at heaven, and then you look over and you’re like, ‘Oh, well, never mind.’ ”
His saving grace? The unmade bed is at least in his colour scheme.
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This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
The bequests benefit charities, distant relatives and even pets
4 min
Charities, distant relatives and even pets are benefiting from surprise inheritances. They can thank people without children.
Not having children is becoming more common, both among millennials and older people. A July Pew Research Center analysis found that 20% of U.S. adults age 50 and older hadn’t had children.
And many of these people don’t have wills. An AARP survey found half of childless people age 50-plus who live alone have a will, compared with 57% of others that age. Those without wills have less control over what happens to their money, which often ends up in the hands of people who don’t expect it.
This phenomenon of a surprise inheritance is common enough that it has a name: the laughing heir .
“All they do is get the money and go, ‘Ah ha ha, look at that,’ ” said Michael Ettinger , an estate lawyer in New York.
Kelley Gilpin McKeig, a 64-year-old healthcare-industry consultant in Ridgefield, Wash., received a phone call several years ago saying her cousin Nick Caldwell left behind money in a savings account. They hadn’t been in touch for 20 years.
“I thought it was a scam,” she said. “Nobody else in our family had heard that he had passed.”
She hunted down his death certificate and a news article and learned he had died about a year and a half before in a workplace accident.
Caldwell, who was in his 50s, had died without a will. His estate was split among cousins and an uncle. It took about two years for the money to be distributed because of the paperwork and court approval involved. Gilpin McKeig’s share was $2,300.
Afterward, she updated her will to make sure what she has doesn’t go to “just anybody down the line, or cousins I don’t care about.”
Who inherits
There are trillions of dollars at stake as baby boomers age.
Most people leave their money to spouses and children when they die. A 2021 analysis of Federal Reserve survey data found that 82% of heirs’ inheritances came from parents.
People with no children say they want to leave a greater share of their estates to charity, friends and extended family , according to research by two Yale law professors that surveyed 9,000 U.S. adults.
Rebecca Fornwalt, a 33-year-old writer, created a trust after landing a book deal. While her heirs are her parents, her backup heirs include her sister and about a half-dozen close friends. She set aside $15,000 for the care of each of her two dogs.
Susan Lassiter-Lyons , a financial coach in Florence, Ariz., said one childless client is leaving equal interests in her home to her two nephews. Another is leaving her home to a man she has been friends with for a long time.
“She broke his heart years ago and she feels guilted into leaving him property,” Lassiter-Lyons said.
A client who is a former escort estranged from her family is leaving her estate to two friends and to charity.
Lassiter-Lyons, who doesn’t have children, set up a trust for her two dogs should she and her wife die. The pet guardian, her wife’s sister, would live in their house while taking care of the dogs. When the dogs die, she inherits the house.
In the Yale study, people without descendants—children or grandchildren—intended to give 10% of their estates to charity, on average, more than triple the intended amount of those with descendants.
The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, which manages $1.3 billion of assets, a few years ago added an “heirless donors” section to its website that profiles donors and talks about building a legacy.
“Fifteen years ago, we never talked about child-free donors at all,” said Lew Groner , the foundation’s vice president for marketing.
In the absence of a will, heirs are determined by state law . Assets can wind up in the state’s hands. In New York, for example, $240 million in unclaimed funds over the past 10 years has arrived from estates of the deceased, not including real estate, according to the state comptroller’s office. In California, it is $54.3 million.
Hard questions
Financial advisers say a far bigger concern than who gets what is making sure there is enough money and support for a comfortable old age, because clients without children can’t call on them for help.
“I hope there is something left to leave,” said Stephanie Maxfield, a 43-year-old therapist in southern Colorado. “But if there isn’t, I think that’s OK, too.”
She said she would like to leave something to her partner’s nieces and nephews, as well as animal shelters and domestic-violence shelters. Her best friend is a beneficiary.
Choosing an estate executor and who would handle money and health decisions on your behalf can be difficult when you don’t have children, financial advisers say. Using a promised inheritance as a reward for taking care of you when you are older isn’t a good solution, said Jay Zigmont , an investment adviser focused on childless people.
“Unfortunately, it is relatively common to see family members who are in the will decide to opt for cheaper medical care (or similar decisions) in order to protect what they will be inheriting,” he said in an email.
Kirsten Tompkins, who is from Birmingham, U.K., and works in consulting, along with her husband divided their estate among their dozen nieces and nephews.
Choosing heirs was the easy part. What is hard is figuring out whom to ask for help as she and her husband get older, she said.
“A lot of us are at an age where we are playing that role for our parents,” the 50-year-old said, referring to tasks such as providing tech support and taking parents to medical appointments. “Who is going to do that for us?”
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
