RoomHopping returns! Eliza Shapiro and Claire Sabel took a trip to Hartley to watch Ally McBeal and have a cocktail with Winston Nyugen. If you have RoomHop-worthy digs, email tips@bwog.net with a picture.

The LLC is not a place one might associate with color. Or, you know, fun. Winston Nyugen, CC’11, is both, and his decked-out Hartley single proves it.

Nyugen has turned his 129 square foot room into a mini hotel. The walls are painted in different shades of red, because “I always choose the fall fashion colors. This year they were red.” He also took advantage of a Circuit City going-out-of-business sale and bought a massive flat-screen TV, joining a Mac atop his dark wooden Ikea desk.

Almost no Columbia furniture remains in the room. Nyugen assembled Ikea bookshelves, where he keeps every book he’s read at Columbia excluding his Lit Hum texts. He also has a Bed Bath and Beyond bar, stocked with glasses for all occasions and a wine rack. Nyugen has recently started collecting different flavors of Absolut Vokda. “Pear is the best one,” he related. Empty bottles line an upper shelf.


It is easy to feel like you are somewhere other than Amsterdam Avenue in Nyugen’s room. Still, he has made sure Columbia stays close: Nyugen has filled an entire cabinet with the University of Chicago’s Great Books series—an intimidating collection of history, philosophy, and science. “It’s a testament to Columbia,” Nyugen explains.


Other precisely-placed odds and ends include an award from the mayor of Houston, Texas, Nyugen’s hometown, a collection of ballet slippers, and vases of stacked red apples, inspired by decorations from the Prada store. “They’re probably rotting,” Nyugen laughed, “We’ll just make applesauce.” Other nods to nature include a banana peel door stopper he purchased at the MoMA Design Store and a topiary azalia plant is growing under his white and gold curtains.


Why all the effort? Nyugen explains, “I used to work for Hillary for President, and I spent a lot of time living out of a suitcase and staying in other peoples’ places. So when I got a place of my own I thought, ‘I need to make this my own.’”