Student living

STUDENT ACCOMMODATION HAS evolved from the run down squat squalor depicted in the 1980s comedy The Young Ones. The iconic Che Guevara poster, beer-can pyramid and traffic cone pinched on the way home from the pub have nearly all been relegated to anthropological history.

It’s all about storage solutions these days, says Olive Donovan, owner of Howards Storage World, which claims late August and September as its second busiest period after Christmas. She says girls are still more organised than boys, but both sexes are keen to create a space that will “reflect their personality”. The place to start is sharp-looking bed linen. Cartoon characters, football teams or other motifs should be left at home, but that doesn’t mean you have to be drab. Ikea do a great range of reasonably priced bed sets.

For Dermot Bannon, the architect and frontman on RTÉ’s Room To Improve series, storage is crucial. “The average student living away from home keeps everything they own in their bedroom. It becomes their whole life. You need storage for clothes, books, work and personal items.”

He also recommends placing your desk perpendicular to the window to “give you a nice view when you’re studying”.

Most student accommodation comes fully furnished, which limits your scope in terms of how you can personalise it, says Joanne Kelly of interior design company Think Contemporary. “Whatever you do the mood is cheap and cheerful; ideally free.”

The flea markets and the brocante in Newmarket Square, Dublin 8, has great bits and pieces, Kelly says. A can of spray paint can make it your own. For the cafe Wall and Keogh on Dublin 8’s Richmond Street, she sourced furniture from Oxfam Home, salvage yards and markets. It’s pot luck, she says, but students have plenty of time on their hands. Buy right and some of the pieces may even make it into every future home you have. This writer still has a compact and smart campaign chair bought in the Blackberry Market in Rathmines donkeys’ years ago.

You can also achieve a great look using second-hand furniture, says Kelly. "These you can buy at markets, the more down-at-heel auction rooms and car-boot sales." Jumbletown.ie, a website offering furniture and home accessories that people want rid of, can also be a fertile hunting ground. The painted sideboard pictured on the right is a piece that Kelly found on the site. By painting it she brought it back to life.

The student style of designer Gary Cohn, who studied in New York, was all about found pieces. He rented unfurnished apartments but rather than put a mattress on the floor and make do, Cohn set about finding pieces on the street, in flea markets and thrift stores. In his first flat he painted every piece of second-hand furniture fire-engine red because he “wanted them to stand out”. They were of differing styles but the same colour knitted them together.

In another he took the same idea but went for a more minimalist approach, painting all the furniture white, but painting elements in one of six other colours that he introduced into the scheme. A leg became blue, the arm of a chair was painted green and so on.

He also experimented with lighting, something he continues to do. Simple light sockets with electrical wire connected, something you can buy in DIY stores such as BQ or Woodies, were inserted into copper tubing and bent into sculptural shapes. Antique gilding paint made them look aged and distressed.

At this time he also worked for Hasbro, the toy company, and while there accumulated a plethora of interesting toy-themed talking points. He put vertical strips of Velcro across a wall and attached foam flowers to them. His niece and nephew used to love calling by to play with the wall. In another apartment he covered all the dodgy upholstery in white sheeting, but instead of leaving it to hang freely he tied the ends together with rope. It was an idea inspired by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who wrap national monuments. “I had an aesthetic inner voice that wouldn’t let me live in a grimy apartment,” he says. Most students say they’re too busy socialising and studying to be bothered with such arty nonsense. These students should note that his interior flourishes also happened to impress girls. “You live here?” they would ask and then request him to come to theirs and help make it stylish too.

There was an error in last week's article on bachelor pads. Jonathan Legge is creative director of online shop MakersandBrothers.comand works for London-based Studioilse on a freelance basis.