KU designer accommodates student decorating quirks

Carol von Tersch’s interior design clients aren’t wealthy homeowners wanting to impress guests at dinner parties with ritzy amenities.

Sometimes they want a pingpong table in their living room, or a firefighter’s pole running between floors.

Von Tersch’s clientele are the 5,100 students who live in Kansas University housing.

“Students have fascinating ideas,” she said. “I’m always delighted by their creativity. Sometimes I suffer consternation at their determination.”

Von Tersch has overseen decorating and redecorating efforts for KU’s department of student housing for 20 years. Her challenge is to find compromises between student ideas and the principles she was taught as a KU interior design major  and all the while keep the project within her department’s budget.

“The trick is the balancing act,” said Ken Stoner, director of student housing. “She has to work all those things out, and it requires a good deal of insight and understanding of issues and human behavior. Most students haven’t been faced with an opportunity to be part of a decision like this before.”

That was a decision process the men of Grace Pearson Scholarship Hall started last year. The 50 residents decided they were tired of out-of-date carpet, furniture and curtains in their hall.

So they put together a wish list for von Tersch, who met with the students several times to pick out a neutral color scheme and modern furniture. They also wanted more seating and table space in their living room, where students study and have meetings.

Von Tersch said scholarship hall residents typically have more input into the redecorating process than do residence hall dwellers because they’re more likely to stay in the hall more than one year, giving them a sense of ownership.

“Most of the concern was that it didn’t end up being girlie,” said Josh McBeth, an Oklahoma City junior and former hall president. “We didn’t want a purple living room.”

But at the same time, McBeth said the men wanted to honor the history of the hall.

“We didn’t want it to be a bachelor pad,” he said. “We wanted it to be nice  contemporary but tasteful.”

This summer, the hall is getting new furniture and curtains. New carpets are scheduled for next summer.

The typical, the unique

That’s the typical process for a scholarship hall redecorating process, which generally focuses on the living room. Usual residence hall projects involve furniture for lobbies and lounges.

But von Tersch has seen plenty of projects that weren’t so typical.

Take, for example, the men of Stephenson Scholarship Hall, who for years requested the department of student housing install a firefighter’s pole in their hall, so they could slide between floors.

Von Tersch politely denied the request each time. But a few years ago, she finally had heard enough and agreed to install the pole  but without cutting holes in the floor around it, which she said would have been a fire hazard.

“It would’ve been a nice decorative element, and it wouldn’t have cost that much,” she said.

Hall residents quit their requests after that year. Von Tersch figures they stopped finding the request funny after they received approval.

Accommodating requests

Another time, McCollum Hall residents once wanted to change the color of their windows for the entire fifth floor to have a stripe around the building. That would’ve been too expensive, she said.

More commonly, students request pingpong tables or pool tables be put in their living room. Von Tersch tries to convince them their recreation room is a more appropriate place for those.

Students also tend to ask for “intense” colors for their walls.

“I totally agree with that, but I’ve had a little more experience,” she said. “When you take a small paint chip and put that color over the whole room, it can look different.”

But von Tersch said she’s accommodated plenty of other student requests, even if they didn’t exactly follow the rules of interior design.

“You have to be pretty responsive to the students, because they vote with their feet,” she said. “If they don’t like it, they move out.”

Some examples:

 Templin Residence Hall students painted soft drink cans on their walls during the mid-1980s. Their project required obtaining copyright waivers from Coca-Cola.

 Stephenson Hall residents once painted a large Kansas State Powercat on the ceiling of one room.

 Hashinger Residence Hall residents used to paint their favorite album covers on the walls outside their rooms.

“It’s what your client wants, but even doing residential work, you temper that with basic principles and good taste,” she said. “Of course, you don’t ever want to tell anyone they don’t have good taste.”