So Sexy, Dorm Room Style

When Kevin C.L. Ching ’06 and Elena H. Matsui ’06 saw the hallway of their Currier double, they cringed. It wasn’t that their suite was tiny or unequipped. It was just, well, bland. “We didn’t want [our rooms] to be sterile,” Ching says. And COOP mirrors and Abbey Road definitely wouldn’t fly.

They immediately set to work transforming their suite into a dorm-sized shrine to travel, to friendship, and to sex. Ching claims to have “a queer eye” for style; both are deeply interested in aesthetics. He calls their room “warm” and “sexy,” while she describes their style as “chic, minimalist, and cosmopolitan.” But, she added, “our inspiration has always been sex.”

The entry hallway is a sometime-catwalk and an homage to sex and circle motifs. “We travel a lot together,” Matsui says of the pictures of the two, partially nude, on a beach in Hawaii. On the oppposing wall hang blown-up “drunken” snapshots, lit by the dim glow of a red fabric chandelier. A cluster of dangling plastic circles and thin red fabric adorn the ceiling, a red shag rug the floor, and a full-length mirror the far wall. “We like to strut before we go out,” Matsui says.

The pair found an eccentric fix for their bare bathroom walls: Japanese porn. Dozens of rectangular cutouts from Bukakae, black and white pencil sketches from pornographic cartoon magazines, adorn the walls. White packing tape holds the impromptu wallpaper in place.

“Packing tape is our friend,” Ching says of the stuff, which also keeps a spherical white lantern dangling above his bed, if the term applies. Ching gave his bedframe to Matsui (for a king-size bed) and created a sleeping/sitting/lounging area on one half of his floor. The black fabric on the floor separates his desk space from this nest. A squishy black mattress pad, shaggy white rug, and a handful of black and white throw pillows make a “loungy feel,” Ching says.

Large shards of broken mirror adorn the wall above his desk and two neat rows of square mirrors line another one. The black and white color scheme and geometric motif is persistent. Even the mounted black and white portraits of him are in rectangular frames. “That’s from a friend who knew that I was just vain enough to hang up pictures of myself,” he chuckles. “You can write that down.”

Matsui replaced the drab dorm lamps with the mod light of a movie projector. The compact machine rests on her desk, poised to illuminate the opposite wall, blank except for a clothesline of scattered photographs. Matsui also mounted two gilded wood carvings, trinkets from the pair’s trip to Bangkok.

“We live in the Quad. We have to entice our friends somehow,” Matsui joked. “So we used a sexy room.” The said enticing must work. From the red lights in the hallway, to the H-Bomb cover on the front door (featuring the roommates), the corner nook in Bingham Towers is absolutely “sexy.”

And unique. “As far as I know there hasn’t been another co-ed room at Harvard,” Ching says. The best friends convinced the housing office to let them share a room, on the condition they not have a walk-through bathroom. “I raised the issue of an ambiguous gender status,” he said, referencing his suggestion that he “might be uncomfortable living with a guy.”

That, he said, is the “sexier part of the story.”