Winning Student Residents With Design
Amenities may wow, but design features can create connections.
Over the past several years, private student housing providers have sought to woo residents with attractive amenities. Well-equipped gyms, rooftop pools, barbecue pits and game rooms were widely touted. Quartz countertops and stainless steel appliances provided additional marketing points.
But the amenity options became ubiquitous, and adding more was a law of diminishing returns, as one student housing developer pointed out to me, since it would detract from the number of beds relative to amenity space.
Time for a new competitive advantage, and I’m seeing some interesting possibilities in interior design. (Full disclosure: As a parent of college-age kids, I have not experienced any of this personally, as mine have only been in pretty traditional on-campus or urban student housing.) Designers’ approaches range, but as I’ve pored over entries for MHN’s Excellence Awards, what’s stood out are efforts to tie the housing into someplace the residents will relate to—their university, the city, the neighborhood. This manifests itself in a variety of interpretations, given the diversity of university cultures—but let’s face it, that’s what differentiates one school from another.
Last year’s Gold winner for Interior Design—which we explore in depth in the feature “The Whistler Off-Campus Housing That Feels More Like Multifamily”—is a case in point. For Whistler, developer and co-designer LV Collective conducted research on what students at Georgia Tech wanted in a Midtown Atlanta home and found greater interest in relating to the neighborhood than to the university itself, Executive Vice President of Design and Curation Chelsea Kloss told Associate Editor Mikayla Sciortino. The result was spaces that draw the community in—including a coffee shop (not your usual student housing amenity!) and outdoor patio—in addition to design touches geared toward creating energy, comfort and connections. Approaches ranging from attention to details like the herringbone flooring, incorporation of natural woods and subtle application of greenery to the active use of common space (which is too often dead space) impressed last year’s judging panel.
This year’s student housing entries present a range of other approaches to creating natural connections with the university or metro culture, through use of color, texture and décor, and natural outdoor as well as inviting indoor spaces. I can’t give you more than that sneak peak, since our judges are still making their final decisions, but as a college parent I’m seeing consideration not just for what will wow students but what will make them feel at home and invite them both to settle into studying and to find recreation.
Intrigued? Watch for announcements soon about the Excellence Awards winners and the upcoming awards party.
