Space Relations: How to Decorate With Your Roommate

I mentioned before that my freshman roommate and I once won Best Smelling Room when we lived in the dorms — an honor that she and I did not take lightly. No, we didn’t receive any accolades or trophies, but we did eat a giant plate of nachos to celebrate. The only problem was, we’d entered our room in the Best Decorated contest and come out with the Best Smelling award. We couldn’t understand why our room didn’t win for best decoration. Was it the clash of the brown and yellow tapestry against the sky blue and white-patterned carpet we’d laid down? Or maybe the way we covered every inch of our lofted bed frames with pictures of previous spring break trips to Florida? For years, I was mystified by our loss, until one day it hit me: Our style was basically “more is more,” and it sucked.

No one knows what they’re doing when they leave home and attempt to decorate a dorm room, or a whole house or apartment. Just owning a chair – any chair – can feel like a major accomplishment. Sure, you try to find things that match, but ultimately you’re just happy to have a place to sit down.  Over the years, I’ve come to understand two things when it comes to decorating homes shared by roommates: 1. Decorating requires a mindful, objective eye, and 2. Decorating with roommates can be a huge disaster.

The issue is that everyone has his or her own tastes, not just in terms of furniture but in terms of art, wall colors, and the general placement of items. It took me three years to understand that “more is more” is a terrible design philosophy. In our junior year, one of my roommates suggested that maybe we “de-clutter” the living room and I had absolutely no idea what she meant. Sure, there were random stuffed animals – many of them holiday-themed, all of them gifted by my mother – on display, and OK, maybe I had a weird obsession with buying “cool” candles, burning them down three-quarters of the way, and then just leaving them for months on end to collect on the coffee table, but I thought that was chic. “More is more” was SO me! It was bohemian! The only problem was, that was precisely what my roommate wasn’t.

Never until that moment had I given any thought to all the crap I’d stacked, assembled and put up all over the house. It dawned on me that I had essentially taken over our home with my stuff, and my roommates weren’t so fond of my choices. They had no attachment to the Bjork poster that I’d tacked up in the kitchen. They had no fond memories of the Beanie Babies I’d collected through high school that were huddled up on a shelf in the living room bookcase. To them, my stuff was just stuff that they didn’t want to see. And it was a hard lesson to learn. During that day of de-cluttering, my roommate removed approximately 9000 of my trinkets and tchotchkes from the mantle, leaving behind only 3 identical candles and a couple of flower vases. It made a huge difference in the room and actually impacted how I’ve decorated ever since. I instantly felt bad for putting her through my “hoarder phase” and vowed to never do that to another roommate again.