3 Interior Designers Transform The Same College Apartment - Space Savers - Architectural Digest

These three interior designers have been given a photograph of an empty college apartment, and they have been challenged to create a renter-friendly design. My name is Xavier, and my design style is cinematic, transporting, and human. I'm Darren Jett, and my design style is seductive, cinematic, and narrative-driven. My name is Naz Nazawa, and my design style is joyful, colorful, and storytelling. What will they do with all this blank space? Presented in partnership with IKEA. My first impressions of this space is that it's pretty much a basic, standard fare college apartment. The floor plan, it's kind of a run-on sentence. The flow is just choppy and weird, and I want to really combine it and make it make sense. This is so much nicer than the apartments that I had access to when I was in college. It's bare bones, but there's so much potential here. This is a college apartment, and it really looks like one. It's a little bit tragic, but it's sort of what you get. My overall vision for this apartment is I'm going to make it into a place that is really set up for learning and creative exploration, and also that it still works for entertaining. The social aspect of being in college is still really important. I really want to create a space that feels like a salon environment for college students. People are coming together in a welcoming space. This could involve vintage pieces, antiques. So my overall vision here is I want to play with color. Please enjoy every color equally. The rest of the vision relies on resourcefulness. I have this total vision of celebrating student creativity. There are so many incredible designers. I really like hardwood floors for this, especially because you don't know who's coming in with shoes on. So we're going to leave the hardwood alone, maybe just put a rug, a vintage Moroccan shag rug. And then in the kitchen, I actively don't like this rectangular subway tile. I love the idea of doing peel and stick. So this peel and stick material is from Auto Studio, and it's literally rated for the floor. You're supposed to use it on tile. So where we delineate the kitchen, I'm going to cover all of the floors with this peel and stick. And it's such a cute pattern. What I also love about it is peel and stick is not just for easy on application. It also is designed to be easily removable. I think my main problem with it is that it is split up half and half here. I think that if we unify these two spaces with one sort of floor material and make it all feel like one big space, that it gives me a little bit more flexibility where I put certain pieces of furniture and how I arrange this room. I'm going to use a sisal carpet tile. And the great thing about carpet tile is you just lay it down and then you can take it back up again when it's time to move out. My first thought is how can we create this kind of like natural flow? And I think the perfect beginning to that is always with the flooring. Right now, we sort of have these two spaces that create this kind of L shape. What I really want to do is create three zones. I want to have a living area here. I want to have a dining area here. And then, of course, the kitchen would be here. In the living area, I would love to just have a big red rug. And then in the dining area, I want to have a big Persian rug that really takes up all of this kind of basic, boring tile. So right now, the walls are this kind of off-white, eggshell, basic, boring apartment paint that everyone gets. We can do better than that. What I'd love to do is to create a space that feels aged. I want to tea stain the walls. And you take literally tea bags and paper towels and you start sponging. It's basically faux painting on the wall. So for the walls in the living area, I'm going to use this large format corkboard tile, which is really easy to put up. You can just use some double-stick tape or pin it into the walls. And I'm going to cover all those surfaces of those walls. Besides providing a really beautiful kind of surface texture, it also is going to allow people who are living in this house to pin up all their, you know, studies or inspiration. It can be really flexible and ever-changing. It's very warm and neutral. And I think it pairs really nicely with this sort of, like, warm and neutral sisal carpet tiles that I'm putting down on the floor. One of my favorite lavenders presently is African Violet from Benjamin Moore. It's got this, like, very sophisticated, dusty gray undertone to it. It looks beautiful with the floor tile. You can actually make this into a limewash. This is my personal favorite example of what that kind of material can look like. It's one of those things that creates so much dimension. Now that we have the tea standing on the wall, what I really love to do is to actually start to highlight the separation between the living area and the dining room. It's right on this header here. Why not do some stenciling? Why not create this kind of cool, like, threshold that goes from one area to the next? I'd love to do something like a Vitruvian scroll that feels fresh, but also is referencing the past. One of the main things that I can't change about this kitchen is this fridge. There's nowhere else to put it, so I kind of want to tie the rest of the kitchen together to that. So I'm going to use these peel-and-stick stainless steel tiles and a combination of just kind of flat stainless steel, but also stainless steel pegboard, apply those to the wall, and that's going to tie the rest of the kitchen together with this one big appliance in the center. It's all super easy to install and uninstall. The last thing I'm going to do is further kind of delineate the different spaces. So I'm going to use just a quick track application on the ceiling and hang some off-white curtains that can actually pull clothes to separate the kitchen off from the living areas when it's not being used. It's all about building layers in this room. I'd love to have really more separation between the fridge and the dining area, for sure. And an easy, simple division to have is curtains. You can have curtains that are $10 a yard, white cotton, so easy to find anywhere, and I just want to swag them along this wall, creating a kind of Romanesque dramatic effect. The kitchen cabinets themselves are in pretty good shape. I don't think right now that the wood is great. I suspect that this really ugly cheap veneer wood that you see in a lot of rental apartments, and I don't think that's worth preserving at all. I'm going to paint it in this grayish, cool off-white that can kind of match the tone of the stainless steel and sort of tie this kitchen all together. I am going to be painting these cabinets. It's totally doable. And I'm also going to add hardware. You will notice in the existing cabinetry, it's very 80s. It's sort of a partial overlay, like you would just kind of get your fingies and open the doors and drawers. I want to add hardware. I think that's a great way to just add a little sparkle moment. And for a lot of apartments that already have hardware, swapping those units out is really doable and easy to put back together with no cost and no damage. The hardware that I am showing on these cabinets are these beautiful round spheres in brass, and then the same spheres with a rod in between for the drawer pulls by Low & Co. I love Low & Co hardware. I'm also going to change the kitchen faucet. Look at the one that is in the before. I don't love that. We're going to change that out. It's very easy to do. You can basically get under the sink cabinet or ask for help, but it's a total DIY upgrade. And I'm going to replace it with this beautiful brass unit from Breezo. So I'd like to really just start by painting the cabinets. Our landlord said we could paint them. It's totally fine. I'd love to do a color that's a bit more of a greenish yellow. Something like this from Benjamin Moore would be perfect. Again, Moore stenciling. It actually references Jean Lavin's bathroom in Paris in the 1920s. I think it's a perfect combination with the Vitruvian scroll elsewhere. This kind of organic shape with the geometry. Besides the fact that the cabinets are not great, there's actually no backsplash. You should always have a backsplash. It is literally to protect the wall from getting wet and rotting because of water exposure. So I'm just a college student. I can't do a whole lot. Wait a minute. Peel and stick. How funny is this? I found this from The Smart Tile. This is a very wild, very dimensional faux tile that you can stick on the wall just like peel and stick wallpaper, but it's actually plasticized. So it would actually be water repellent. And I think this sort of soft pinky color is so cute with the color of the lavender cabinets that it will be surrounded by. All right. Let's talk furniture. When I'm designing for a place where the communal like living, dining, kitchen areas are being used by multiple people, there are so many things that can come about that are challenges. For me, the way to address that is to create a furniture plan that is pretty versatile where a sofa could also count as a workspace or a laptop space or a napping space for your friends who are staying over unexpectedly. This area back here with the two doors has kind of a strange flow, and I need to make sure that there is a pretty easy path of travel between those two rooms. So I'm actually going to sort of flip the expectation and put the dining area back in this space and then bring the living area up front here, which in my experience, being close to the kitchen was where everybody hung out anyway. So I think that's fine. So for the dining table, I'm going to do something that I did in college, which is basically just get two sawhorses from Home Depot and a tabletop. And voila, there's a dining table. I'm also going to use these kind of very flexible IKEA benches, which are great because you can squeeze more people into them than you can a regular chair. And I'm going to add floating bookshelves along this back wall here, which felt kind of unusable to me as a place for furniture because of the way the door is positioned. But now it's a great, you know, full wall storage solution. We're going to have bookcases on this empty wall right here. This is perfect for this intellectual atmosphere that we're trying to create. The bookcases, they're glass fronted, so you see the books inside, but they don't collect dust. I really want to create some depth in the living room. I want to sort of show what's going on behind this door, but it's a really unnecessary door in my opinion. So let's take it off the hinges. We can put it somewhere. I can go underneath the sofa. I can go in a closet somewhere. And whenever you leave, you can put it back on. Easy peasy. I've done it way too many times to count. In the back of the room, I want to start with a salon type of seating arrangement because we're not really building the room around a TV. Really, this is a room for studying, a room to hang out, a room to be together with other people. The look and feel of the sofas is vintage. It's thrifted. These particular ones are Napoleon III style with fringe and a beautiful pattern along the back. But they could really be substituted for anything that was found or given. And then in the middle have an Ikea coffee table. The seating area is not huge, so it really doesn't warrant having a big, chunky coffee table. It needs to be something that's more movable and just more friendly for conversation in everyday life. I have always, always loved pallet furniture. I'm going to put the pallet sofa right at the transition where the flooring changes between the living space and the tile in the kitchen. The other thing that that allows is for this main wall to be the TV wall. So we're going to do a pallet sectional sofa here. It is the most college thing to just go find a beat up old pallet and then paint it. We're going to paint it with the same African violet paint. So again, it's another part of this color drenching story. That will be the base of my sectional sofa. And then the cushions over top. This is where we have fun with being resourceful college students who have more time than cash and maybe a sewing machine somewhere. There are so many different art nonprofits throughout the country where people just donate scraps of things that might be useful to an art student or a designer. So as a college student, I would go seek that out. I would go to a used furniture type place and just pick up old cushions that fit. You could even take the foam and cut it down and use that as the foam core for your own cushions and reupholster them. And so imagine you're just sort of like sifting through the piles upon piles of old fabric remnant and you found this. Amazing. Almost a cardamom type brown tweed from Loro Piana. I also love this House of Hackney Jacquard. It is so cute and adorable. And also this works. I could imagine myself losing it as a student if I found this Gastoni Daniella woven material. I tried to think about how we got furniture when I was in a college apartment. Vintage stores or Salvation Army. So I have this kind of cool bench-like sofa that I imagine they find with this kind of nice striped fabric here in kind of like a sort of a hemp weave. Pairing that with a stainless steel coffee table which can kind of echo the stainless steel that I'm using in the kitchen. Some other antiques sprinkled in throughout the space. This Moroccan chair upholstered in like a carpet fabric would be a cool find. And then as much sort of extra storage, this green Ikea bar cart felt really flexible to me. Something I could move around. To fit with the sofa, I want to use a laptop stand rather than a coffee table. This one is so cute. It's bright orange from Ikea. I think it is darling and very functional and lightweight. So you can just kind of move it around, put your coffee mug on there, put your laptop and actually do work from the sofa. It's perfect. And then this corner is a perfect spot for a giant, beautiful oversized accent chair. Student art and student design is incredible. Carl Durko is a Philadelphia-based designer and maker and artist extraordinaire. And I met him when he was a student in Philly. So this chair, which he calls the gnarle chair, is this ridiculous like bobbly, gigantic, weirdly sturdy and amazing chair that looks like big felted feathers are all over it. Such a cool experimental design. And realistically, you too could find an amazing roommate who has beautiful student work from class that has nowhere to go except your future apartment when that class is over. So in the dining area, what I want to do is have a round table. Really good for flow. The space is not huge. This table is a Biedermeier-style table. It really fits in with the vibe of the sofas and chairs. It's kind of old world look. I want to pair it with IKEA chairs. Something that's easily foldable and you can bring up more if you want. I also really like the pairing of old and new together at all times. We're trying to create a continuous thread for a small space. Even the cotton canvas of the chairs, it picks up on the curtains that we're doing elsewhere. In the dining space, I'm also featuring another of Carl Durko's work, this actual table. He designed it for an outdoor rooftop patio and bar. So we know that it can hold up to messy, spilly people. I don't want to use chairs. I want a backless stool. You can kind of push them under the table if you're having a big party in the apartment. These are the cutest and they're upholstered so the seat is comfy. The design is from Carlo Contin from Adentro and I think they're really neat. So now let's talk lighting. Let's talk lighting. For the lighting, I hate the golden brass and wood ceiling fan. If there's one place where these college kids are going to maybe invest in, it would be to hire an electrician to replace that ceiling fan. I would love to also bring a little bit more of that stainless steel energy from the kitchen into this room. I'm going to bring in this patinated bowl uplight fixture into that room, which I think will provide a really nice diffused light into the space. On either side of the sofa, I'm gonna use these two little Ana Luisa Corrigan table lamps with a skirted lampshade, which I really love. And I think those add a nice softness to this space. I really love a ceiling fan. I really hate a ceiling fan with a light in it. I can't tell you why, I just don't like it. You can take the ceiling fan away, put it in a closet somewhere, whatever, bring it back whenever you move. But I want to have a light in here that is ambient. We can have something like a paper lantern, like this one from Ikea, right over the living space. It feels very flattering. It's a perfect glow on everyone that you're having over in your space. On either side of the sofa, I want to flank that with two lamps that really give more of that ambient light into the room. These particular lamps are vintage by Paul Mayen. I chose this pendant for the dining area. I think it's really cool because it picks up on the color of the walls. It has this sort of flowy effect that matches the drapery. And it also produces a direct lighting, which is perfect for an evening with wine, doing your homework. In every kitchen, I love to have a nightlight. In this kitchen, I want to have a small table lamp. It just kind of gives a nice glow to the space. Realistically, I am not going to be removing out of the ceiling, the ceiling fan and light. But I do want to add a little bit something. So I love the idea of putting two sweet little sconces on either side of the television, just to give a bit of face-level ambient light. Plug-ins being the necessary thing, because I'm not doing electrical work in my nine-month rental apartment. These are from Annie Lee Parker. I absolutely adore her work. This is the kind of thing that I, as a college student, would save up all of my side job money to buy and then hang on with me for like the rest of my life. And also, how perfect that Annie makes these little sweet five-petal flower shapes, which goes so beautifully with the floor tile pattern. I also really am into the whole cordless battery-operated lamp thing right now, because I could bring it from the laptop stand over to the kitchen at night, almost like a candlestick that I'm just kind of bringing around with me, or put it on the dining table while I'm doing some work late at night. This little lamp is the lamp that could. So now we're going to talk about decor. We're really trying to create a space that feels collected, that feels layered. The first thing I want to do is have a moment that's above the sofa. This here is a rococo mirror carved out of wood, something that could be found at an antique store. Over on the bookcase, we have plenty of space to showcase objects. I really love the idea of having shelves mounted on stands that just go up there. It also references the wave effect of the stenciling that separates the dining area from the living room, and it creates this really cool cohesiveness to the space. I'm still not 100% sold on the separation between the kitchen and the living space, so I do want to add curtains of some sort. So many college students have strong, warm memories of beaded curtains, but rather than go full coastal with wood beads, I'm envisioning shimmer screen. They are metal beaded curtains, and we would kind of drape them down and then just hold them with these little hand-shaped curtain holders, like curtain tiebacks, and they would just kind of hang here. They're pretty affordable, and you don't have to use the whole thing. So I would probably, just to save budget, kind of just have a little bit on the sides, and they're meant to swag and stay open, so they're a visual demarcation of space, but they don't literally close. Realistically, I am keeping the ceiling fan, and one of the things as a designer that I love doing is anything that has to stay, I try to make it an active choice by bringing, matching, or coordinating other things in that finish, which is why I did a brass faucet, and I'm doing a brass gold color beaded curtain, so everything feels like it goes together and feels like a deliberate coordination. This was sort of designed to be kind of a neutral backdrop for, you know, maybe three disparate personalities, and I think a lot of that texture and color and playfulness will come in with whatever the artwork is that they decide to pin to the corkboard walls, whether it's whatever project they're working on or research, or maybe some artwork that they really love, but I think there's a few other ways through, you know, decor and furnishing that we can, you know, sort of bring that color and texture into the space. So in the kitchen, for example, I'm going to bring in some big woven baskets, and then I'm going to put this great Ikea clock on top of the mirrored pedestal because I think it's just an incredible color blue, and this room needed that shock of blue in it. And then I'm going to add just a touch more blue with the lovely sort of Delft painted vase, very similar to one that I own on the coffee table for flowers, which I think always helps brighten up a space. On this Samsung Frame TV, which is realistically where the art is going to go on the walls in this sort of an apartment for college students, I have artist Serge Gay Jr. He's a fabulous muralist and artist in San Francisco. This is one of his student pieces. I love it. And finally. No sofa is complete without a blanket. A lush, fluffy, comfy, cozy, beautiful throw. It's just a really delightful, bright pop of color, and you can wear her out. It's fashion. It's home interiors. It's everything. And so what I want to do here is create symmetry by having pedestals, and on top of the pedestals, having big, beautiful urns. But we really want to create a sense of order, a sense of specialness, and we're trying to have a division between the spaces. Inside of the urns, you could have real plants like these ferns. You could also have fake plants like these ones from Ikea. There's a gap between the top of the kitchen upper and the ceiling. It's a perfect place to add extra storage. You can put baskets up at the top here. I'm really happy with how this design came together. I feel like the design for this room is really a space where some students could be very free to sort of express their interests, always be working, always be developing, and having a space that also works for entertaining. It's really important for everything to be pretty flexible and for these kids to be able to come in there, make it their own quickly, and move out quickly, and probably take with them to their next spot. Wow, this design to me feels really welcoming. It feels very warm. It feels very collected. It really feels like a gathering space. It feels like a place where I might study a little bit more than what I did, honestly. It's a really warm environment, and I would be probably sad to pack it up and move on, but I know that I would have pieces with me that I bought, that I purchased, that I would carry on into a totally new life. My final thoughts on this space are I love it. I think the lavender was really a success. I would absolutely have adored living in a space like this. Realistically, in my wildest dreams would this have been my college experience, but, you know, anything is possible. Oh my gosh. What? Okay, can we talk about your color? Oh my gosh, thank you. Yes, this person is living in a lavender fantasia. Totally. Who's wanting to explore lavender and tomato red together. I love this beautiful orange-red floor. Thank you so much. These are actually peel-and-stick floor tiles. Amazing, so creative. I love a peel-and-stick for a student who has nine and a half months to live in this place. So true. Darren, I am obsessed with this what appears to be mosaic tile work across the headers. What's going on there? It's actually stencil work. Stop. We're bringing stenciling back. We're bringing faux finish back. Xavier, I really love how you've married the aesthetic movement with these, like, functional pieces. I think there's a really cool language going on. I was kind of thinking about what pieces of furniture, like, somebody might be able to source from their local Salvation Army because that was how a lot of people furnished their apartments when I was in college. Whoever lives here has a very strong design sense. They want to be, you know, mood boarding all day. Art history and architecture. Architecture, for sure. Yeah. I think Darren's students are studying art history. Or, like, English lit. Ooh. Yeah. Your student, I actually want to say, is, like, a very, like, chic, like, physics major. Cute. I mean, I'm getting, like, color, so I'm getting, like, either, like, a fashion student or a design student. I think it's, like, really smart with the pattern and the purple and lilac, and it's kind of golden green. I think it's, you know, pretty forward. Totally. So, I see that. A physics design double major. I love that. That student does it all.