Moving The Furniture As An Act Of Aesthetic Protest

I was super-excited about being assigned to Aberdare Hall, the oldest rez building on campus. It was built in 1884 by Lady Aberdare as housing for the few female students at Cardiff University at that time. From the outside, the building is distinguished dark red brick, sooty with age. Say the words “Aberdare Hall” to anyone on campus, and their response will be “Ooh, that’s the pretty one, right?”

…well…

I’ll admit my excitement decreased a little bit to find that the interior had been remodeled sometime circa the 1970s to reflect the latest aesthetic trends in hospital interior design. The drywall is white (except where it’s a bizarre off-white), the carpet is one of those indestructible institutional ones, and the doors have stainless steel safety closers. The furniture is plywood. And catch the instructions I wrote for myself to find my room:

1. Through the door at the end of the brick colonnade across from the library.
2. One revolution up the linoleum stairs.
3. Through the blue fire door. (It looks like you have to keycard in, but you don’t.)
4. Left, right, left.
5. Up one revolution of the imitation-wood stairs.
6. Down the long white corridor.
7. Up the three carpeted stairs to the mailbox room.
8. 180 degree turn in the mail room. Through second blue fire door on the right.
9. Hard right. Up the five carpeted stairs.
10. Follow the weirdly curving hallway.
11. Left turn through the burgundy fire door.
12. Up one revolution of the original wooden stairs.
13. Left through the burgundy fire door. My room is to the right.

These are the instructions to get to my room. Good Samaritans have found me twice wandering the labyrinth in despair, seeking the fresh air I know I’ll never grasp again. Well, that’s one way to make friends.

My room is actually bigger than my dorm room at UBC (thank you, Victorians, for high ceilings and spacious floor plans), but you also really have to hunt for character. It has the same institutional carpet as the corridor, and I don’t think the plain molding on the wall is original. I do appreciate that the desk chair is a comfy spinny chair, even if it’s that same godawful cheap burgundy as the carpet.

But the character is there if you look. The leaded windows are big and still framed in brick, with white paint smudged up untidily around the edges. There’s a radiator that at least looks elderly.

And, when I looked really hard, I found a fireplace with a mantel. There was a low plywood bookshelf in front of it. The fireplace is nothing fancy; the mantel is at about waist-height and only two feet wide. The flue is covered over with a sheet of fiberboard. But gosh darn it, if I’m going to live in a Victorian building I’m going to have a Victorian fireplace, and just you try to stop me, so in a supreme act of rebellion, I moved the bookshelf across the room.