c/o Aiden Malanaphy, Senior Staff Photographer

Hey Argus, we didn’t know you were coming! Welcome to our half-house duplex on High Street.

First, step through the vintage wooden foyer into our minimalist living room. Here you are met with a worldly, upscale University couch with blue diamond stitching, featuring warm Ikea pillows and a serape blanket. I (Aiden) decided to update the matching blue University side chair with yellow fabric that I applied myself with some clever stapling, which is just out of sight. We even installed a floor lamp to provide a warmer shade of light than that of the searing fluorescent bulb embedded in the ceiling. What ties the room together, though, is our modernist white shag carpet with intersecting black lines, textured with WasteNot charm.

Past our unmentionable kitchen and up the winding staircase, the first stop is my (Aiden’s) room. The decorations here fit into two distinct categories: art I love, and art I love to hide soundproofing with. My two favorite pieces are easily a 1969 Air India poster featuring a flower-belching euphonium and a poster for David Byrne’s 1986 film “True Stories” that features Byrne reading a newspaper in a very unnatural pose, both of which were my dad’s. I also can’t forget my print of Salvador Dalí’s harrowing painting “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” whose elongated elephants and crumbling clocks keep me morally grounded, if not haunted. Then there’s The New York Times game section taped to the left of my desk, featuring an image search that I have yet to fully complete. On the other end of the spectrum, I appreciate my slightly pixelated tapestry of Van Gogh’s “Almond Blossom,” most for its ability to hide four noise-absorbing pads of foam that attempt to dampen the cacophony from the street below. Speaking of cacophony, the next stop is Aidan’s room, just down the hallway.

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Sometimes clichés exist for a reason; lacking a discerning eye for college dorm decoration, it’s pretty hard to go wrong with the deeply unoriginal combination of fairy lights and a poster wall. At least, that was the basis on which I (Aidan) rationalized doing so for my own room. My favorite wall piece might be the ’60s psychedelic David Bowie poster. It’s a little hard to make out from the picture, but he’s wearing a ring that looks like a giant salamander. Totally cool.

Placed on the desk are my latest efforts to atone for killing so many succulents before properly knowing how to care for plants: two ferns, one in a typical clay pot and one in what I’ve heard called a “jarrarium,” a sort of self-sustaining mini ecosystem, which is super cool and super easy to make by yourself. Taking cues from “The Big Lebowski,” I put down a big, patterned rug, both to have something pretty to look at and to have something that feels nice under my feet while working at my desk or making music. I still haven’t found a piece of wall art to fill the space near my bed, so until something really speaks to me, I have one of those sunset lamps projecting onto the blank space. Maybe I’ll put up a tapestry. Long live the cliché.

Aiden Malanaphy can be reached at amalanaphy@wesleyan.edu.
Aidan Fitzmaurice can be reached at afitzmaurice@wesleyan.edu.