Bernie Pleskoff, the director of housing for Loyola University, is a tolerant man. He understands that new surroundings may compel college students to do strange things, like stabbing the orange vinyl chairs in their dormitory rooms with ballpoint pens, or decorating with posters of the Fridge. Yet he thoughtfully refrains from painting these rooms an institutional green or paving them with gray vinyl tiles.
”People between 17 and 22 are changing,” Pleskoff says soothingly.
”They want space. They want territory. They want something they can personalize and call their home.”
Of course, dormitory rooms look nothing like home. They look like monastic cells: four vanilla walls, a few indestructible brown chunks of furniture and a strict ban on painting.
Yet this can be the most liberating space in the world, a halfway house between parents and the real world–and on this forgiving little room a student may inflict his decorating sensibilities to the fullest extent of the law.
Just to explore the possibilities beyond Indian-print bedspreads and sticker-spattered trunks, The Tribune asked three young interior designers to do something glamorous–and affordable–with a dormitory room.
Loyola provided quarters in Mertz Hall, a towering student residence with big views and tiny rooms.
The designers–Mindy Fulgenzi, 26; Peter Latto, 26; and Debbie Standish, 24–provided the money, time and expertise.
They were allowed to spend up to $500 each–a pittance to professionals, though more than most students would dream of laying out. But then the point was to generate ideas, not recipes.
Unlike students, our designers could not bring things from home. When they shopped, however, they had to shop like students. That meant no professional discounts, no buying at the Merchandise Mart where only designers can go.
Buying on sale was encouraged, however. So was rifling through thrift shops and garage sales.
Pleskoff`s rules applied. No painting. No wallpapering. (The school once let students do these things but had to stop. ”They painted their walls black,” the housing director says.) And no structural damage, except for unlimited nail holes in the ceilings or walls.
Here is what happened:
MINDY FULGENZI
RUFFLED ROMANCE FOR $460
She stood on a chair in the dorm room, pounding in a nail with a brass bookend, deep in concentration. Lack of a hammer has never fazed Mindy Fulgenzi. Neither has sewing. Faced with four sheets that needed hems, she grabbed the nearest roll of masking tape. Presto, instant hem.
”In the beginning I had limited resources; so I learned to improvise quite a bit,” says Fulgenzi, who runs her own business, Inside Design, from her Arlington Heights home. ”If I run out of the house without a hammer, I can use my shoe. That`s how I think.”
She started on her dormitory room by rummaging through the sale linens at Marshall Field`s and waiting for something to steal her heart. This turned out to be a flowered Bill Blass comforter. Its name is ”Romance,” and it became Fulgenzi`s theme.
Without stopping to measure, she swept up four matching sheets to shirr on the walls. From these linens sprang the finished romantic look. Ribbons and lace lent a touch of girlishness; a generous use of fabric kept it sophisticated.
Trying to think like a student, Fulgenzi kept her methods simple. For instance, to drape one wall with fabric, she hefted her bookend and installed brackets for a cafe-curtain rod simply by pounding in the screws.
Then she taped up the hems on the king-size sheets, slipped them over the rods and let the ruffled bottoms (once the tops) drag stylishly on the floor. In the same fashion she framed the picture window with the twin sheets, making it appear that each curtain hid part of a glass wall.
Barring a visit from a helicopter, the bare window posed no problem. Still, Fulgenzi wanted some kind of adornment. Being a rule-breaker, she bought a tablecloth. Where the window was set back, she installed a simple tension rod. Over it she folded the round tablecloth, which fell in a graceful half-moon.
”It was so simple,” she says. ”I never used a scissors or cut a thing. I didn`t make one stitch in the whole room. I didn`t even have to measure.”
Subtle as it is, one of the biggest things at work in this room is contrast. ”With all the fabric, this could easily look washed out,” Fulgenzi says. ”To avoid overdoing the floral print, I used white lace pillows and the white tablecloth. I thought it made a crisp, clean look.”
Lastly, Fulgenzi tied pink ribbons around the bedposts and a white ribbon around a bunch of dried flowers. Over the bed, she hung a frothy bit of lace and potpourri.
But more than half her money, or $244, went to fabrics and linens for the walls and bed. ”I felt it was well worth it, to get that softness,” she says.
PETER LATTO
FORMAL LOOK FOR $459
Like the other designers, Latto took one look at the institutional beige curtains in his dormitory room and relegated them to a bureau drawer.
Then he whipped out a tape measure, sized up the window and drove off in his blue Mercedes Benz to order miniblinds.
Latto started his own interior design business five years ago, when he was a Loyola junior himself. Today he commands $1,000 for a two-hour consultation. (In contrast, Fulgenzi and Standish handle their first meetings more informally–and for free.)
”I haven`t had to buy inexpensive things for three years now,” Latto says. ”I may spend hundreds of dollars on a single yard of fabric.”
Presently, he is decorating a $1 million Ft. Lauderdale home that belongs to a Chicago couple. Here, he pulled off the look he wanted with uncharacteristic economy. ”I`ll tell you something,” he said. ”I had a great time doing it.”
Latto chose his style before he shopped. ”I wanted a feminine look, and on the formal side,” he says. ”I grew up in a formal house: You walked in the door and”–he sucks in his breath, sharply–”you didn`t want to breathe. I`ve always liked it.” His bedroom at home is painted the color of sand, the walls covered with etched Lucite that looks remarkably like crystal.
To pull off that kind of formality in a dormitory, he wanted the window tailored to a fault. Miniblinds, custom-made for $137, went up first. Panels of a light-colored, printed fabric, gathered top and bottom on cafe-curtain rods, framed the blinds.
In a fever of economizing, Latto found a clip-on reading light for $4 and a ceramic ginger-jar lamp for $15. Burrowing through a suburban thrift shop, he discovered three gilt-framed watercolors for $15, bargained them down to $14, and hung the expensive-looking trio over the bed.
Finally, offended by one of the Loyola chairs, he hid it in a niche behind the door and brought in a $79 wicker fan-back chair that lent a slightly regal presence.
”I got up at 6 o`clock one morning,” he announced when the room was complete, ”and did all my shopping in one day.” Installation took only half that time, but Latto had to carry his purchases up 17 flights of stairs in four trips when the elevators chose that morning to break down.
Latto works out of his home in Glenview, where his mother manages the business and a secretary helps out. He delegates the hands-on work to installers and other tradesmen and, to the dismay of some of his colleagues, refuses to draw out his plans for a room.
”Drawing takes hours and hours and hours,” he says. ”I can walk into a room and know exactly what I want and how it`s going to go.
”There are only so many ways you can do a room. Your creativity comes from your colors, your fabrics and how you perceive the room as you want it to be.
”This space was small, and in dealing with small space, you don`t want to crowd it,” he says. ”The most important thing in this room was the bed. Get the linens, and pull the colors from there.”
DEBBIE STANDISH SOUTHWESTERN FOR $523
Debbie Standish went wild over two expensive pieces of art that pushed her over budget by $23–an infraction she could have amended, but didn`t, by taking a handful of throw pillows back to the store for a refund.
”I kept thinking, no student will pay this much for a picture,” she says. ”But I had to have it. You could do the same room for probably $200, if you just picked out an inexpensive print.”
Refusing to be ruled by the tiny rectangular space, Standish tried to drag her bed from a long wall, where it faced the window, to a short 6 1/2-foot wall that seemed to be precisely the same length as the bed.
It wasn`t. The bed stuck. Standish dug out a screwdriver and dismantled the frame. She stashed the headboard and footboard in her closet, which bothered Bernie Pleskoff not a bit. She laid the bedsprings, which were flat, on the floor. Over the bedsprings went a $24 boxspring, and over that, the single mattress provided by the school.
For her pains she got a built-in look, as if the mattress had been cut to size. ”This way you have a bed that`s also a sofa,” she says. ”It looks more like a living room or a study.”
Standish, who works out of her home in Westmont, found her Southwestern theme on a shopping trip. It started with a $31 taupe Liz Claiborne comforter that made her think of desert sand and was bolstered at a print shop, where she was captivated by two Sahara-like serigraphs. The pair cost $285 but pleased her so much that she parted with three-fifths of her budget.
”Really, art makes the room,” she says. ”That`s what your eye focuses on.”
She lugged the serigraphs along as a color standard for her other purchases–10 throw pillows in rust and blue and nine yards of turquoise fabric.
The free-form curtains were hung in minutes. Laying the fabric out full-length, Standish folded one-third of it over the long way and centered the whole nine yards over the window. Then she nailed it up in swoops, so the folded edge hung down like a valance and the rest fell as it may.
She added a hanging lamp, a $24 imitation of a $180 Italian original by Mario Bellini for Artemide, and a cactus. In the end, all of her purchases were fairly major items.
”People can overdose on accessories,” she says. ”I can`t stand clutter, and I hate things to dust, little itsy-bitsy statues. When you`re in school, you don`t have time to clean.”
Her best tip for a small room: Keep it simple; follow a theme. ”Start with a piece of art, or a color, or something you collect,” she says, ”and go from there.”
Loyola University wishes to thank Lawson Painting and Decorating, in Palatine, for painting the dormitory rooms for this project on a last-minute deadline.
