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Dorm Rooms, 100 Years Before IKEA
January/February 2010

©Yale University Library

For three centuries, Yale students have tried to turn standardized dorm rooms into distinctive homes that reflect their personalities. This preoccupation may have reached its height in the late nineteenth century, when students frequently hired professional photographers to immortalize their Victorian chambers. (This Lawrance Hall room, photographed in 1889, belonged to Henry Hallam Tweedy ’91.) The Yale University Art Gallery is featuring such photos—and details about the diverse objects found in them—in its first stand-alone online exhibition, “There’s No Place Like Home: Student Rooms at Yale, 1870–1910.”  

Related

Photos of Yale rooms—on campus or off (Jan/Feb 2010)

There’s No Place Like Home: Student Rooms at Yale, 1870–1910

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