Dorm Room Design Goes Pro: Commissions Hit $20,000

Dorm room commissions can cost thousands of dollars — and Mississippi-based interior designer Shelly Gates of Mary Margaret Designs charged up to $20,000 for a single room, according to a People magazine report last year. Gates declined to confirm her fees. The number signals how far the professionally designed dorm room has traveled from cinderblock minimalism toward full-service residential design.

The trend is most visible at Southern and Midwestern schools. MK Decker, a 2019 University of Mississippi graduate, recently completed a room for two Ole Miss freshmen featuring pristine white monogrammed pillowcases stitched in pale blue, chinoserie-inspired artwork flanked by gold wall sconces, a patterned rug and coordinated throw pillows. The room was built to be photographed, though it will only be lived in for nine months. The aesthetic dovetails with Greek life's long-running preference for pastel-hued, monogrammed, Lilly Pulitzer-leaning interiors — a culture mainstreamed in recent years through RushTok, viral videos documenting sorority rush season.

The decorated room now functions as part of sorority evaluation. "They asked about color schemes and how we designed our rooms," says Sydney Riepe, a freshman at Auburn University, describing her recent sorority recruitment interviews. A well-decorated room has become something young women are expected to describe and defend to sorority members.

Social media drives the escalation. "It 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. "You're not just comparing your room to the person across the hall anymore."

A growing business

Designers treat dorm projects much like traditional residential jobs. "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 built a business after noticing the market during her own freshman year at Ole Miss in 2015, when "it was the very beginning of more serious dorm decorating." She now designs and sells hundreds of duvet covers (up to $360), matching shower curtains ($145), artwork ($475) and monogrammed throw pillows ($165) during back-to-school season. She also consults at up to $150 per hour to help tie a room together.

Chicago-based residential interior designer Jen Segall began offering dorm design as a service after decorating her daughter's freshman room at Villanova three years ago in pink, orange and white, inspired by umbrellas along the southern coast of Italy. She charges up to $3,500 per project, deliberately keeping her fee accessible. "I personally love seeing the creativity that a lot of these expensive dorm rooms show," Segall 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 working primarily in high-end residential projects, founded Dormie in 2025, a company selling shoppable dorm room design kits. "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. Her process mirrors her residential work: establish a design direction, create a color palette, and source across multiple vendors. Kits include bedding, furniture, wall decor, storage, bath items and rugs, with product documents and items priced between $800 and $2,500. A custom tier — two 30-minute consultations, a bespoke kit, two rounds of personalized edits and a 3D rendering — costs $4,000.

Content culture and its costs

Decker traces the trend to Ole Miss and similar schools, where students "literally wear several-hundred-dollar dresses in 100-degree heat to go to a football game." Now every college experience doubles as content. "The bar has been raised for sure," says Michele Gratch, an Atlanta-based interior designer who decorated her daughter Bella's room at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville this year. "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 frame the spending as care. Kat Cook of West Point, Mississippi, enlisted Decker to create a colorful Kentucky-themed space for her daughter Lucy, a golfer on the University of Kentucky 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," Cook says.

The costs exclude students without means. North Carolina–based interior stylist Ebony Staten, a first-generation college graduate, founded The Vogue Foundation, a non-profit that decorates dorm rooms for first-generation college students for free. "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.

Critics see status anxiety displacing self-expression. "When you scroll through Instagram, they all start to look alike," Gratch says. "Some are so over the top that they border on tacky." Caroline DeRossette, whose daughter attends East Mississippi Community College, agrees. "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 lands mostly on young women — the ones fielding questions about color schemes during rush. When Segall's twins left for college, she designed her daughter's Villanova room around Italian-coast umbrellas. For her son, headed to St. Olaf to play soccer, the job came down to bedding, soccer posters, and Chicago flags.