Cool rooms

By Susan Williams

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For the past four years, IU Bloomington's Residential Programs and Services has showcased domestic creativity on campus with a "Cool Rooms" contest. The challenge? To decorate a space that is something like 10 feet x 13 feet, transforming it from a "taupe-ish," cinder block neutrality into a comfy and very cool home away from home.

Now, 10 x 13 is a small space. Even Trading Spaces, the wildly popular television show in which neighbors spend a weekend redecorating a room in each others' houses, has a square footage requirement.

Hannah Holt , an IU sophomore majoring in journalism and gender studies, knows this. She is a 2002-03 Cool Rooms winner, and she checked with producers of Trading Spaces, one of her favorite shows, to see if they might consider doing dorm rooms. Forget it, she was told. Like I said, 10 x 13 is small, really small, too small in my opinion and in that of Trading Spaces producers.

So how did this year's winners, chosen from about 170 entries, go about turning a minuscule space into something cooler than cool? Let me count the ways.

Holt, like many other winners, started with a theme, say, like "lips." Her favorite movie character is Margaret "Hotlips" Hoolihan from M*A*S*H. Lips are everywhere in that room, from floor to ceiling.

IU junior Emily Solt, a vocal performance major from Whitehall, Pa., has a vintage collection of Barbies. She couldn't cart them all to Bloomington (her dad had a fit at all the stuff to haul as it was) so she made a Barbie lamp that serves as a focal point beside her orange and hot pink-dressed bed. She fashioned the lamp by depriving four of the buxom babes of their lower halves and stuffing what was left into a clear lamp base. I'm here to tell you, it is very cool.

The two guys featured on this story went for "smooth." They succeeded. Steve Alberti, a freshman from Reno, Nev., majoring in bassoon, and Nick Csicsko, a freshman music composition major from Fort Wayne, used faux Oriental type rugs on the floor and art prints on the walls. Classical music was playing when the photographer and I visited them. The rather calm and sophisticated look was sustained by storing the television in the closet. And speaking of storage, as in closet space, I noticed that it wasn't an issue at all for these guys as it was for their female counterparts. They had no problem hanging their clothes and stashing their clothes together behind one set of doors while the other became the entertainment center. Minimalists, I guess.

In all seriousness, every room photographed was extremely cool. And every room was a winner in the end, and every student won a prize. Trading Spaces doesn't know what it's missing.

Cool rooms in 2003

For audio streamed interviews with the students about their winning rooms, click here.

And, don't miss the talking Austin Powers cutout, very shaggadelic by the way, at our archival site featuring the winners in 2001:
http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/120800/coolroom/index.html