Mom Charges Thousands Of Dollars To Decorate Dorm Rooms For College Students
All this for a room the kid is going to live in for nine months?
YinYang | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro If you or your children are anywhere near the time of life when kids go off to college, your social media feeds have likely been chock-full of videos about students' lavish, often downright opulent dorm rooms.
Those old cinderblock dorms of the past are now being transformed into tiny bespoke Ritz Carltons, and it's costing parents sums of money that rival college tuition, and making interior designers very, very rich.
A mom charges upwards of $20k to decorate dorm rooms for college students.
Back in the day, going off to college was pretty simple. You showed up with your clothes, toiletries, some sheets, and maybe a microwave, covered your walls with a "Cruel Intentions" or "Pulp Fiction" poster, and got down to the business of college (mainly, getting drunk). Done and done!
Now? TikTok and Instagram are full of videos of kids loading up entire U-Hauls to move into their dorms as if they've just bought a five-bedroom McMansion in a gated community. And the stuff these mostly female students are moving INTO these dorms? Opulent window treatments. Monogrammed throw pillows. Elaborate rugs. For a dorm room. That they'll live in for nine months.
That's frankly insane, but more importantly, it's expensive, and Shelly Gates, a mom from Mississippi, is one of an ever-growing handful of designers pocketing the cash from this bizarre trend, tens of thousands of dollars for each dorm, to be exact.
If you follow this trend online, you've seen Gates' designs. Known as @marymargaretdesignsdorms on TikTok, she regularly goes viral for her eye-popping, upscale designs where every detail is bespoke and just-so. And it's made her incredibly in-demand.
The dorm makeovers started as a fun project for her daughter, then grew into a very lucrative business.
Gates' life as THEE go-to dorm designer is fairly new. An elementary school teacher for 13 years, her new career began with her own daughter, who went off to Louisiana State University in 2020. She decided to use her lifelong love of design and makeover her daughter's room.
"I just put it on Facebook, you know, bragging as a mom — and it went crazy,” she told People. "I thought, ‘I could do this. This could be like a fun little summer job.'" Five years later, that "fun little summer job" is a second act. She quit her teaching job and has now devoted herself fully to Mary Margaret Designs.
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For the upcoming school year, business has been booming. Gates told People she's done 15 dorm rooms so far this summer, mostly for girls attending Southern universities like Alabama, Ole Miss, and her daughter's alma mater, LSU, all for huge five-figure price tags.
Her process is like any other designer's: Kids send her their "inspo," usually from Pinterest, "and most of the time they all look exactly the same," she joked to People. Then she starts pulling together the colors, looks, fabrics — all the details to go into realizing the student's dream dorm.
Streamlining dorm room move-in for parents is one of the secrets of her success.
From sketching out plans to walking the student and their parents through the selection of everything from throw pillows to opulent mini-kitchen accessories, Gates says she gives every client the same special care that a designer would give to someone decorating a house.
But her services also include something that most parents would die for: Move-in services. Included in her giant five-figure packages are packing, loading, and unpacking services. Students and their parents basically just show up at a "turnkey" dorm room.
Taking all that effort and guesswork out of the process would probably be worth the price tag to many parents in and of itself, but Gates said it's also about today's mainly Gen X parents wanting their Gen Z kids to have a better college experience than they had.
"People my age, when we went to college, we really did live in the prison cell,” Gates told People. “So I think my generation doesn’t want their kids to have that. They want their kids to have a beautiful little nest. It’s their first little home.” What a blessing to have the resources to pay someone to ensure your child doesn't face this "problem." Nice work if you can get it, as the saying goes.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
