"Gilded Versailles" dorm rooms? What would "Dirty Ernie" say?

Sometimes when I start reading a story in the New York Times it’s so ridiculous — and such a sign of our time — that I read it out loud to my wife over the breakfast table.

A case in point, from Sunday, Sept. 1, headlined: “College Living Gets the Gilded Versailles Touch.” The subhead: “Students are hiring decorators to trick out their dorm rooms, at costs that reach five figures.”

The Times’ Danielle Braff reported: “Today some undergraduates — especially in Southern states — are hiring interior designers to completely make over their dorm rooms at a cost of up to thousands of dollars per room.”

Of course it’s not the students who are hiring these people; it’s their indulgent parents who are footing the bills. According to Braff, some of the undergraduates arrive on move-in day “with a professional designer by their side.”

The National Retail Federation tells us that college students spent about $87 billion this year to set up their rooms.

Braff quoted Ginger Curtis, who founded Urbanology Designs, an interior design studio in Dallas that works with students preparing to go to college: “We’re moving away from Ikea and getting the opposite of fast furniture.”

Curtis says she can help students who are “on a budget” for just $7,000 to $8,000. Such a bargain!

Curtis recommends custom fabrics for the curtains, monogrammed pillows, linens, a sofa and coffee table, headboard and dust ruffle (huh?); handmade murals or removable wallpaper; luxury light fixtures; and real wood hutches, shelves and cabinets made to fit the room.

Braff interviewed Lesley Lachman, a University of Mississippi first-year student who was shocked when she saw the dorm room in which she was supposed to live. She described it as “completely not doable to live in.”

Mommy, daddy, help me!

In order to spare Lesley this trauma, her parents hired the people at Essentials With Eden. Lesley and her roommate (well, their parents) spent about $3,000 for the company to create “a modern-looking, New York City-style dorm room with a touch of Southern charm. This included lamps, a custom cabinet, lettering above the bed and curtains in shades of pink, blue and green with gold accents.”

And so now, Lesley exults, “I leave my door open with so much pride and confidence!” Isn’t she worried about theft?

Eden Bowen Montgomery, the founder of Essentials With Eden, charges about $10,000 per room for “the full service,” which requires Montgomery and her “team” to arrive on move-in day and “put together the rooms from scratch.”

Usually it’s women who want such treatment. But Joyce Huston, who founded Decorilla, worked with a male client who requested that his dorm room be converted into an Amazon rainforest — plants, a mural and “a funky hanging chair.”

Braff wrapped up her account by writing: “Remarkably, some parents, or even students themselves, are still D.I.Y.-ing the dorms.”

“Remarkably”?

Braff tracked down one such “remarkable” young man, or at least his mother: Edith Gomero, whose son (not named in the story) just moved into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with “his clothing, a couple of posters and a corkboard.”

That sounds familiar! When I arrived at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. in September 1968 I was not accompanied by a professional designer. I brought my clothes, a portable record-player and my albums, along with one or two posters. One of them quoted Henry David Thoreau: ““If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

I didn’t bring a corkboard. I just taped up whatever I came across that suited me.

As for my roommate, his attitude and lax standards of cleanliness (and off-color jokes) were so extreme that the guys on our hall quickly dubbed him “Dirty Ernie.” No monogrammed pillows or dust ruffles for that dude!

Somehow we survived, Ernie and me.

When my wife Jennifer Kaylin rolled into Middlebury College in Vermont in the fall of 1974 she carried with her a padded ottoman from her bedroom back home and a couple of posters. One was a large depiction of Bob Dylan with colorful psychedelic swirls sprouting from his brain. And for all four years of her college experience she displayed this classic: “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.”

“My roommate and I walked downtown to the Ben Franklin store and bought some spider plants,” she recalls. “We macramed a lampshade. We had a lot of fun doing it ourselves, being independent of our parents!”

OK, you’re all saying: yeah, but that was a long, long time ago. Well, when we took our daughters to Brown and NYU, they weren’t loaded down with stuff either. My elder daughter Natalie brought with her some movie posters and photos of her high school friends. My younger daughter Charlotte brought to Brown her trusty lion pillow, some posters (“Spirited Away,” “The Parent Trap” and soccer star Michelle Akers) and a quilt her mom made out of Charlotte’s childhood T-shirts and soccer jerseys. My son-in-law Chris McEwen brought posters of some of his favorite films (“Vertigo,” “The Graduate,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Out of Sight”) to his room at NYU. There was no thought of hiring a professional designer, nor did they ever talk about anyone else there entertaining such a notion.

Incidentally, that New York Times story drew an illuminating letter to the editor from Julianne Hirsh of Brooklyn. She began it: “I am appalled.”

Hirsh continued: “When I entered one of the Seven Sisters colleges on a scholarship many years ago we didn’t think about decorating our rooms. Well, maybe we put up some curtains, got a nice bedspread, bought a chair secondhand, hung up a poster. We were there to study and learn. We even had jobs: sweeping halls, scraping dishes in the dining room, setting out coffee after supper. We didn’t have many food choices or up-to-date athletic equipment. Wonder why college costs are shamefully high today?”

She concluded her letter by asking: “Where are our values?”