The Latest Status Symbol on College Campuses Is a Professionally Designed Dorm Room

Gone are the days of tacking up a tapestry and calling it a day—for many students, an elaborately decorated dorm room is becoming a social necessityIllustration: Lizzie SouflerisYou’ll know who the beds belong to thanks to the pristine white monogrammed pillowcases stitched in pale blue. That accent color pops up again and again throughout the perfectly coordinated room: on throw pillows, in the patterned rug, in the chinoserie-inspired artwork flanked by gold wall sconces. It’s the kind of space that’s built to be photographed, and you can hardly tell it’s a dorm room that will only be lived in for nine months.Created by MK Decker for two University of Mississippi freshmen, the room may seem over the top, but lavishly outfitted dorms like this one are becoming the norm, particularly at Southern and Midwestern schools. The visual excess dovetails with the aesthetics of Greek life, which has long embraced a pastel-hued, monogrammed, Lilly Pulitzer-leaning style. You may have learned about this cultural phenomenon in recent years via RushTok, a collection of viral videos documenting sorority hopefuls and the elaborate outfits, accessories, and social aspirations that come with rush season.Sydney Riepe, a freshman at Auburn University, says the topic of dorm room decor came up in conversations during her recent sorority recruitment. “They asked about color schemes and how we designed our rooms,” she says of the sorority sisters interviewing hopeful rushees. Increasingly, a well-decorated room is something young women are expected to be able to describe and defend to sorority members, making their rooms effectively part of their evaluations.Decorating your college dorm “used to be more about making your room feel like home, but now, with TikTok and Pinterest, it feels like an ‘aesthetic’ room has become necessary,” says Lauren Brown, an Ohio State senior who has noticed the trend get more intense during her college career. “You’re not just comparing your room to the person across the hall anymore.”A growing business for designersWith the pressure on, it’s even becoming more common for students to bring in professionals to help fulfill their wildest decor dreams. Dorm room commissions can cost thousands of dollars, with well-heeled parents footing the bill. Mississippi-based interior designer Shelly Gates of Mary Margaret Designs received a lot of attention last year when People magazine reported that her fees for dorm room designs reached up to $20,000. (She declined to confirm to AD how much she charges for her services.)Gates and other designers branching into this niche say they approach these projects much the way they might tackle a traditional residential job, often including custom furniture pieces. “Since every dorm room is different in terms of layout, dimensions, and storage needs, there are times when a custom piece is the best way to make the most of the space,” Gates tells AD.Decker, a 2019 University of Mississippi graduate, is an artist and dorm room product designer who built a business after noticing the growing market during her own time on campus. When she decorated her own dorm room at Ole Miss as a freshman in 2015, “it was the very beginning of more serious dorm decorating,” she says. Now she designs and sells hundreds of duvet covers (these run up to $360), matching shower curtains ($145), artwork ($475), and monogrammed throw pillows ($165) during back-to-school season. She also works as a design consultant, charging up to $150 per hour to help tie a room together.Three years ago Jen Segall, a Chicago-based residential interior designer and mom to twins (one boy and one girl) now in their final year of college, decorated her daughter’s freshman dorm room at Villanova in pink, orange, and white, inspired by umbrellas along the southern coast of Italy. “It just seemed like fun and a natural extension of what I was already doing,” Segall says. Soon after, she began offering dorm design as a service to set her business apart. She charges up to $3,500 for a project, preferring to keep her fee more accessible. “I personally love seeing the creativity that a lot of these expensive dorm rooms show,” she says, “But for me, that level of expense and excess doesn’t align with who I am as a designer.”Olivia Erwin Rosenthal, an interior designer who works primarily in high-end residential interiors, also noticed a business opportunity in the space. “A friend of mine was sending her daughter off to college and asked me where she could find cute, inexpensive things for her dorm room,” says Rosenthal. In 2025 she founded Dormie, a company that makes shoppable dorm room design kits. “Once I started poking around, I was amazed by how many great, affordable pieces were out there. The problem was that they were scattered across so many different retailers, and there wasn’t an easy way to see how everything could come together into a room that actually felt designed,” she says.She realized she could take essentially the same process she uses for high-end residential projects and apply it to dorm rooms: establish a design direction, create a color palette, and source across multiple vendors to layer in lighting, art and accessories. She charges for the document that outlines all the products and between $800 and $2,500 for the items. Kits include bedding, furniture, wall decor, storage, bath items, rugs and other pieces that might be used in a dorm room. Clients looking for a more custom experience can hire Rosenthal for a personal consult, which includes two 30-minute sessions with the designer, a bespoke Dormie kit, two rounds of personalized edits and a customized 3D rendering for $4,000.The dorm room industrial complexDecker traces the trend to the “deep roots of wanting to look pretty and be pretty” at Ole Miss and similar schools, where students “literally wear several-hundred-dollar dresses in 100-degree heat to go to a football game.” But these days there’s an added layer: Every college experience is becoming content for social media, making a well-appointed background for filming all the more desirable.“The bar has been raised for sure,” says Michele Gratch, an Atlanta-based interior designer who decorated her daughter Bella’s dorm room at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville this year. Gratch insists that TikTok and Instagram are driving the “comparison culture” at play on campuses. “Every post, video, and story is stylized and edited. Everyday girls who aren’t influencers still worry about their own brand. They are all hoping to go viral,” she says.Parents say it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind, for both their kids and themselves. And they see their efforts as an expression of their love. Kat Cook, a mom who lives in West Point, Mississippi, enlisted Decker’s help to create a colorful Kentucky-themed space for her daughter Lucy, a college athlete on the University of Kentucky golf team. “I knew her days would be busy and demanding, so it was important to me that her dorm room felt comfortable, peaceful, and like a place where she could truly relax and recharge,” says Cook.The prohibitive costs of designer dorms, of course, mean that wealthy students are at an advantage. North Carolina–based interior stylist Ebony Staten, a first-generation college graduate, started The Vogue Foundation, a non-profit organization that decorates dorm rooms for first-generation college students for free. Her mission is to focus on the financial barriers and many first-generation students face. “There’s something powerful about a student walking into that space and realizing, ‘Someone thought about me. Someone invested in me. This was created specifically for me,’” she says.The pressure to get it rightStill, for some students, the room says less about who they are and more about who they’re trying to keep up with. “When you scroll through Instagram, they all start to look alike,” Gratch says. “Some are so over the top that they border on tacky,” she adds. Somewhere between the mood board and the monogrammed pillows, the dorm room stopped being a place to figure out who you are and became one more thing to get right.Caroline DeRossette, whose daughter attends East Mississippi Community College, sees the same shift. She’s not opposed to a beautiful space, but she thinks the competition takes an emotional toll on kids. “When a young person walks into a dorm and immediately feels like theirs isn’t good enough, that’s a problem,” she says. “When the room becomes another measure of status, money, popularity or whether you fit in, we’ve missed the point.”The pressure to fit in lands mostly on young women. It’s the students who are rushing into a sorority who get asked about their color schemes, and “everyday girls,” in Gratch’s words, who worry about their own brand. When Jen Segall’s twins left for college, she designed her daughter’s Villanova room around the idea of umbrellas in the southern Italian coast. For her son, headed to St. Olaf to play soccer, the job came down to bedding, soccer posters, and Chicago flags.Not a subscriber? Join AD for print and digital access now.Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of design in your inbox.