Despite what movies and TV shows might tell you, dorm life is rarely glamorous, and Hannah Brown — who certainly knows a thing or two about glamor — is well aware of that fact. The former Bachelorette star has had many beautiful homes, from Santa Monica to Nashville to the Bachelor Mansion itself, but one less-than-stellar place she lived was her freshman year dorm room at the University of Alabama.
“I lived in one of the grossest dorms there was at the University of Alabama,” Brown, who went to Bama from 2013 to 2017, tells Her Campus in an exclusive interview. “It was a challenge, but fun — everybody was having to do the same thing, trying to make their space really homey and customize exactly how they wanted their space to be.”
Brown recalls transforming her room, with its “nasty, crusty” cinderblock walls into a college girl’s dream. “When I moved into my first dorm, that was the first time that I had full reign of what I wanted, the space that I lived in. What type of part of me did I want it to reflect? What type of mood did I want it to create?” she says. “I will never forget, I had these three poster boards above my little twin bed that I used the Command hooks to put up. [I] created it myself; it was almost like my own vision board above my bed that just really showed who I was.”
Dubbing her college space with a specific aesthetic name — think “coastal grandma” or “dark academia” — wasn’t quite a *thing* when Brown went to school, but she certainly curated a vibe for it. “It was very bright, super colorful, very girly. I remember it was a bright pinky-coral color, blue, and yellow,” she says. “We didn’t use the word delulu back then, but … I feel like it was a little delulu.”
Which is why it’s so iconic that, fast-forward to now, 29-year-old Brown has transformed from student to teacher by partnering with Command Brand to create a Delulu Design 101 course, giving college students tips and tricks for bringing their decor vision boards to life. “If there’s something that you have dreamt up of having in your dorm or your space, you can do it with Command,” Brown says.
So what is “delulu design” anyway? To Brown, the concept of delulu design allows college students to be as creative as they want with their spaces, and to believe that they can create the dorm rooms of their dreams.
“I want to be able to encourage this group of Gen Z college students to really be able to go for it,” she says. “That’s why I love this campaign about going delulu when it comes to your design. This is the time to do it. It’s a very transitional time, and so that should just be a time in your life where you do the thing that you might not want to live in for 10 years.”
Even now that she’s been out of college for a few years, Brown is a big fan of transitional decor and utilizing products like Command’s offerings to update her space in easy and versatile ways. She happily admits her design aesthetic changes as she moves around and her taste matures. For example, when she moved from California to Tennessee in 2023, transitional pieces allowed Brown to change up her once coastal decorations to furnishings more fitting for a landlocked state.
According to Brown, even the design of her most famous home — the Bachelor mansion, where she lived as a contestant and later a franchise lead in 2018 and 2019 — gets revamped consistently.
“They completely renovate it every single season,” Brown says. “They repaint, they have all new furniture.” Of course, to many fans, it’s hard to tell the difference from quick glimpses on the TV screen. “They have their own design aesthetic … It hasn’t changed much since my time,” Brown admits. “They stick true to it, but really do try to make it as transitional as possible, depending on whoever is the next lead.”
So, even though Bachelor Nation seems pretty fixed on one aesthetic, even that long-running franchise switches things up every once in a while — all the more justification to get as creative (or rather, delulu) as you want with your own space, in college and beyond.