Photos: Lillian Schrock
While living in a college dorm room, it can become a great struggle to not only claim your own space, but also to personalize it. Many students at Drake have gone beyond coating their wardrobes with posters and plastering their walls with pictures, but have become interior decorators to differentiate their rooms from every other dorm on campus. Here are their stories:
Room #1: Katherine Fritcke with a kitchen area in a Goodwin-Kirk single
Fritcke has a shelving unit she bought from a fellow Kappa Alpha Theta member when the girl moved into the sorority house. Fritcke arranged the shelving unit in a corner of her single in Goodwin-Kirk Residence Hall. Underneath the shelves is a refrigerator, and on top of the shelving unit is a microwave and more shelves for food and dishes.
“It’s the greatest thing in the world to me,” Fritcke said. “It’s like my own little kitchen.”
Room #2: Keely Hunting and Brooke Porter, Goodwin-Kirk interior designers
Hunting and Porter are the only two inhabitants of a quad in Goodwin-Kirk. They wanted to utilize the extra space in a unique way, so they began rearranging the furniture and doing crafts to make their room one of a kind.
“I would call it homemade bohemian,” Hunting said.
“It’s definitely elegantly crafted,” Porter said.
When one enters the room of Hunting and Porter, the first sight is a bed that they moved from one of the side rooms to be used as a futon in front of a small television. Next to the television is a shelf full of movies, and in front of the bay window is an actual futon. In the room on the left are four desks, two wardrobes and a lofted bed positioned as a day bed. In the room on the right are the other two wardrobes and the girls’ beds. Interspersed throughout the dorm room are crafts the girls made, including cutouts from calendars taped to the wall, bedazzled clothespins strung together with ribbon that are hanging pictures, decorative squares on the wall made from scrapbook paper and ribbon edging and a “tree” on the wall made from cutouts from newspapers.
“People always ask why we put so much time into decorating our room when we’re just going to have to take it all down at the end of the year,” Porter said. “But we are living here for a year, and we want it to feel like home.”
Room #3: Mariam Vahdat and Kristin Turnquist with a “love bed”
Vahdat and Turnquist elected to rearrange their room in Crawford Hall at the end of first semester to create a new environment. Their final decision was to put their two lofted beds right next to each other and cover it with a queen-sized sheet.
“We call it the ‘love bed,’” Turnquist said.
Vahdat and Turnquist often host girls for sleepovers in the large bed. Underneath the “love bed” is a makeshift fort with a futon where the girls often watch movies on Vahdat’s laptop.
