Moving into a dorm room can be a jarring experience for a college student. After all, dormitories don’t have a reputation for being the homiest environment.
So when Dee Keller, a Baton Rouge-based interior designer, prepared to send her oldest daughter to college more than 400 miles away in Austin, Texas, she wanted to make her daughter’s new home as comfortable as possible.
As Business Report details in a feature from the current issue, Keller drew upon her 20 years of experience designing homes and worked with her daughter—as well as her daughter’s three roommates—to design a customized room that reflected their tastes, interests and personalities. She also was aiming to give them a place that felt like home amid all of the life changes they were experiencing.
The room was a hit, not only with Keller’s daughter, Brighton, and her roommates, but with other dorm residents and friends.
“Everyone wanted to see what she’d done to the room,” Brighton Keller says.
Dee Keller likely did not imagine that her maternal instinct to make her daughter comfortable would lead to a successful new niche for her interior design business, Dee Keller Designs.
But that’s exactly what happened. Today Keller works with students who live in all types of collegiate housing—dorms, apartments, sorority houses—at 10 universities, including LSU and other Southeastern Conference schools and schools in Texas. And her client list and universities where she works continues to expand.
For each project, Keller works closely with students to design a room that will feel like home to them.
“The first thing I ask them is, ‘What do you want to make the room feel like yours?’” Keller says. “I ask them what their favorite color is or what color they’d like to see in the room. I’ll do some fabric shopping, then send them a summary and ask them to pick among a few colors. I try to work within their guidelines.”
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