Which American College/University has the Most Opulent Dorms?

Factual Questions
1

Inspired by this thread.

By “dorm” I mean college/university sponsored housing where students who live “on-campus” live.

I’ve seen the inside of a dorm room at about half a dozen colleges/universities in the US, and they all seemed to be… well, I’ll be charitable and say “utilitarian.” Small rooms arranged along a hallway, with communal bathrooms here and there, and common areas hither and yon.

The rooms themselves are completely bare, and it is up to the student to decorate it. Some I’ve seen have had peeling paint, old/nasty carpet, etc. SissieHomie’s dorm room at Illinois College had peeling contact paper on most of the wood surfaces, and she paid to have it replaced. Anyway, the rooms start out bare, and the level of opulence in the furnishings is directly related to the wealth and/or amount of effort the resident wanted to put into it.

Having said all that, what college or university in the US has the nicest dorms? Are there any that are particularly large or well-appointed? Like, nice new carpet, or brass fixtures, or anything like that?

I did some quick googling, and found that the dorms at Harvard look no different from any others I’ve seen.

Some image googling failed to turn up any pics of the inside of a dorm at Brown. Any Brown grads wanna chime in?

Branner Hall at Stanford has a pretty impressive common room, but I couldn’t find any pictures of the dorm rooms.

So, yeah, can anyone point to a college/university with really exquisite, or at least better-than-average, student housing?

2

http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankingDetails.asp?categoryID=7&topicID=47

Apparently pepperdine university is the best.

3

HH: Some image googling failed to turn up any pics of the inside of a dorm at Brown. Any Brown grads wanna chime in?

I wasn’t an undergrad at Brown, but I was a Resident Faculty advisor in one of the dorms when I taught there up to a couple years ago. Some of the new dorms on the Pembroke campus are indeed rather swelligant, with washer/dryers and kitchenettes on every floor, multi-person suites, and so on. But they have their share of concrete cell blocks, too. The furniture is always going to be rather utilitarian, though, because it gets hard use and is expensive to replace.

Be prepared for a wide spectrum of “opulence” within the available accomodations at any given school, too. Many schools use their 1960’s “cell-block” dorms as “freshman ghettos”, and save the wood-paneled singles in their restored 19th-century residence halls for favored seniors. Some of the smaller, older, wealthier liberal arts colleges are likely to have a higher overall standard than some of the bigger universities, many of which saddled themselves with modernist concrete barracks back in the '60s and '70s and can’t afford to tear 'em down.

Yup, checking Wesley’s list I see that indeed, three or more of the top five are smallish venerable colleges. And two of 'em are women’s schools, which IME do indeed tend to have nice dorms.

4

I bet few are as nice as they were 35 years ago. A lot of dorms had actual maid service back then.

In 1970 I visited a Harvard dorm, and it was really quite nice. I lived in Baker House at MIT, which while not opulent was also not a cell block by any means. When I went back for my reunion, and my kids stayed there, it looked like it needed a lot of rennovation.

The dorm my daughter used to live in at the University of Chicago used to be a classy residential hotel. Al Capone had a room there. But it was kind of a mess - though her senior year she was in perhaps the biggest dorm room in the country - it was a gigantic suite bigger than some houses.

5

Agnes Scott, my alma mater, always used to win the Dorms Like Palaces award. No air conditioning in most of them, though, but they are indeed quite spacious and lovely.

6

One set of dorms here at UCD (University of California Davis) is what I’d consider oppulent. The rooms are arranged in a 3 bedroom apartment. Two girls or guys to each room, so 6 to an appartment. New carpet, new beds, new desks, T1 connection in each room. The apartment has its own full bath and living room. Each building has 100 or so co-ed apartments arranged around a central swimming pool. Food is right next door, and there are communal areas with TVs and copiers and whatnot. These are the nicest dorms on campus, though. The worst are on par with awuful dorms around the country.

The downside: there aren’t enough dorms for everyone. In fact, there aren’t enough dorms for the freshman class. After your first year, you’re kicked out to find off campus housing. And, as you would imagine, packing a bunch of 18 year olds into free food and housing with no upper classmen is a recipe for disaster. I found off campus housing before my first Thanksgiving.

7

One other thing: the University kicks you out during holiday breaks too for whatever reason. So, if you’re an international student, you just have to find somewhere else to live for a few weeks. Sucks.

8

The dorms at Harvard vary a great deal. On the one hand, you might have a suite at Adams House, with wood panelling, separate bedrooms and a fireplace. At the other end, you might have a standard, cinderblock dorm room at one of the newer buildings. During the time I was there I had:

  1. A shared single room in a 300 year old building. There were 8 people on each floor, 2 to a room, except for the RA, who had a room to herself, and a bathroom for each floor. The floors alternated male and female. The rooms were quite a bit larger than standard dorm rooms, though and had huge windows with window seats.

  2. A small, standard dorm room single. There were also suites in the same building. Some of my friends that year were sent to a converted Victorian house where they had wildly varying rooms and a shared full-size kitchen and “parlor.”

  3. A one-bedroom apartment with kitchen and private bathroom. It was associated with the House I was assigned to, but was physically separate. It was basically a typical old Cambridge apartment building that the school had bought. I was assigned there with a female roommate, but we both wanted to be with our current SOs, so we switched. The House masters knew about it, but didn’t do anything. My applied for, and got, the same situation my final year by teaming up with a younger femalle student who wanted a single.

9

I forget which house she was in, but my older sister went to Harvard and as I recall her room was pretty nice, what with the wood paneling, hardwood floors, fireplaces, etc. We had the same deal at Yale, but the actual condition of the woodwork varied from college to college (residential colleges; like Harvard’s houses, except without RAs :p), and the ones that have been renovated so far are especially nice. Even freshmen got those types of rooms, but they were housed in a separate place where the buildings weren’t in as good condition (took down 6 mice in my suite when I was a freshman). The standard plan was a common room with the fireplace flanked by two doubles for freshmen and sophomores, or two singles for juniors and seniors.

As for bathrooms, the dorms are divided into entryways rather than into hallways, so there’s basically a stairwell with anywhere from two to four suites for each landing plus a bathroom that has 2x each showers, toilets, and sinks.

There are no in-suite bathrooms or kitchens or anything like that except in the temporary housing where they keep the students of the colleges for the year they get renovated. Likewise with AC.

And perhaps it goes without saying, but the chimneys were all blocked. The fireplaces were a throwback to the first three decades of the 20th century or so when they were actually used. They’re only decorative now, especially if the place has been renovated. Most people put their TVs or a fishtank in them.

All in all, it was pretty kickass. I’d stack it up against any other college one might think of, win or lose.

Also, I have a lady friend at Salve Regina and at least the dorm where she lives is pretty nice. It’s much more like a house or a large apartment with a full-sized kitchen and and stuff. I don’t know if that’s how it is throughout their campus though.

I can also tell you that the vast majority of the dorms at Washington in St. Louis SUCKED.

10

Simmons Hall here at MIT (hey Voyager!) is supposedly the most expensive dorm ever built in the US, not just in terms of gross spending but per student, per square foot, etc.

You wouldn’t know it from living here, though…I guess they wasted most of the money on overhyped, incompetent, self-absorbed architects and useless, “modern” furniture. Not “opulent” by any means.

11

Not all of the dormitories at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh utilize communal bathrooms. In particular, Mudge House and the New Dorms (one of which is called Resnick Hall) use a suite arrangement. In B or C tower of Mudge, you’ll usually find two, two-bed rooms with a bathroom between them. In the New Dorms, you’ll find between two and five beds in a suite that has its own bathroom. These suites get once-a-week maid service to clean the bathrooms.

Furthermore, the New Dorms were constructed with the idea that the University could use them as a hotel for visitors in the summer. They have air conditioning, cable television, and most of them have a living room. There is a fitness center, lounges, and a cafeteria on the first floor. The north side rooms overlook the football stadium. Shortly after these were finished in 1990, the students succesfully agitated to keep the cable turned on throughout the school year.

Mudge House is a former mansion that was donated to the University. After getting the House, CMU built two wings (B & C) of standard dorms stretching from the back of the original mansion and enclosing a lawn. Interestingly, as a student you can live in some of the original mansion rooms (A Tower.) They might have chandeliers, fancy tile floors, and balconies. The original dining room is now a study lounge with giant wooden tables and a big stone fireplace. The original study is now a piano lounge with grand pianos, a fireplace and all of that mansion stuff.

Mudge House The picture on the front of that site shows the courtyard and gardens. At the very rear, you can see the Italian-inspired covered walkway. Just in front of that you can see a reflecting pool.

Here is a map of the first floor. Note that there are dorm rooms in the mansion, such as A101.

On the second floor there are many dorm rooms in the mansion.

The third floor is similar to the second floor.

This is the first picture in a virtual tour of Mudge. Use the “Next” link so that you don’t miss pictures. Unfortunately, they don’t show you the inside of any of the A-tower dorm rooms.

Hereis a movable video tour of the courtyard.

Hereis a moveable video tour of the Piano Lounge.

Hereis a moveable video tour of the Study Lounge.

12

Must be a UC thing, because UCSD does the same thing. I think we even got kicked out for Thanksgiving, although I don’t remember having to clear out the room for those weekends. It was a long time ago, and I’m not sure, but I think that for the longer breaks (about four weeks around Christmas, and a week in the Spring, we had to clear everything out of the rooms and take it with us, because the dorms were used for conferences and cheerleader camps during the breaks.

13

It is as you say.

It gets extra fun for out-of-state residents. In order to get state residency (and thereby lower your tuition) you can’t leave the state during school breaks. So, when they kick you out of the dorms on holidays, you can’t just go home or you’ll literally risk paying for it.

[/hyjack]

14

The dorms at my school (St. John’s College) vary from a handful of the typical ‘two beds in a cinderblock room’ to ‘big divided doubles’. I, through sheer dumb luck, have the largest room on campus, actually. It’s about 10x10.

By divided doubles, I mean, using the example of my room: You walk in from the hallway. My room appears to be a single at first glance. Take a few steps further so you can see around the closet-unit, and there is a door in that wall. It leads to my roommate’s room, which is about half the size of mine, but far more private and quiet. And cozy.

(I thought most schools kicked everyone out for breaks? I know that for everything but Thanksgiving, you need to leave the dorms at my school.)

15

The freshman dorm and common area. Nothing too opulent about it (although it’d probably look better without all the junk. Sorry). It’s merely a first-year dorm, though, so maybe they’re saving the palaces for the upperclassmen.

The common area only serves four rooms (as does the bathroom), so its small size is excusable.

Also, I can sometimes see deer from my window, which I guess is a plus.

16

My alma mater, Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, is a lovely campus in a lovely if snobbish town. No sororities, although there are literary and ethnic societies that the girls don’t live in. Girls share the first two years, and get singles the last two. Perhaps the most beautiful dormitory, if having rather smallish rooms, is the Tower/Claflin/Severance complex. Get a load of that 1920s-style High College Gothic Hall in Tower especially, and the dining rooms. I lived in Tower my freshman year and it sucked to actually live in–full of rich standoffish seniors–but it sure was purty. It’s on a high hill on the site of College Hall, the original building, which burned down in 1917 without a single life being lost. This was largely due to the efforts of fire chief Olive Davis, so in the late 20s they built:

The mirror-twins Stone and Davis They added those weirdo circular flying saucer dining rooms in the late 60s, and unfortunately when I lived there the 1960s refit was still extrant–cheap Danish Modern furniture, avocado rugs, orange chairs in the lodges. But it was very comfortable and the building had ‘good bones’. I wish I could go up there and look around, but they now have professional security and card-keys rather than bored freshman sitting there for three-hour stretches doing “bells”.

The new dorms, Freeman, McAfee, and Bates, are actually over 40 years old now but their Upscale Howard Johnson’s in Tucson look still seems fresh today! Ikea before Ikea was made! Actually, I hated them, even with the nice old furniture crammed into the nice big living rooms. Although the rooms were wicked big. And square. And more blond wood than there is in all of Sweden.

I spent two years in the Quad, the oldest dorms standing (1907-1916). That page says that Munger, way off to the side, is part of the complex. It is lying. Munger is a squat low-ceilinged 1930s nonentity. Lived one year in Pom (best dining room on campus; this was right before they contracted out the food to A Big Corporation, and each dining room had its own chef and level of yumminess) and one in Shafer, which unlike its mirror twin Beebe had lost its dining room. Hence our T-shirt: “Shafer! We eat out every night!” (Yes, that was cutting-edge humor in the Reagan years, children).

There’s also Crawford House, where the independent-minded live (because nobody else will take them), Instead House (used to be Homestead, but then they ran a contest to rename it and my friend Cynthia submitted In-stead as a joke and it won!), Lake House, which is covered by too many pine trees for anybody to notice, and Dover House, a spacious old WWII-era barracks (Wellesley paid a major role in the War and Pres. Clapp was a pioneering WAC) which houses girls who got the lousiest numbers in the lottery that determines where you live every year. Including me a few weeks of my junior year, when I swapped with a friend in Shafer.

Worth a visit for the grounds alone; the dorms and other buildings are set in one of the most beautiful campuses in New England, with a lake and a little pond and rolling hills and everything. Landscaping is excellent and the academic buildings are pretty cool too. Except for the Science Center, with a modern facade built onto the front of the old College Gothic center. We called it the Habitrail.

17

Oh my! What a great building, inside and out!

I went to Bard. The campus is eye-popping beautiful and the rooms were crap, but we were all drunk so we didn’t care.