Envy Apartment

When Young Huh left for college in the 1980s, she brought “one giant poster of The Cure, bedding from the local bed-and-bath store and maybe some desk accessories.” Like so many Gen-Xers, her one creative touch was asking a supermarket for leftover milk crates to use as bookshelves. Now an interior designer , she has helped her own children decorate their dorm rooms, and she’s amazed at the design expectations among college students . “It’s a level of decorating that did not even exist in my world view when I was in school,” Huh said. Today, there are lots of products “that cater entirely to the college crowd,” she said. Interior designer Jon Call sees the same phenomenon: While his main business is designing luxury homes in Manhattan, he also gets asked to design college living spaces . “This new generation has grown up under the influence of home magazines, HGTV and the virtues of ‘ democratic design .’ They understand the value of creating unique spaces for themselves,” he sai...

Seventy years ago this month, my grandfather fled India to join millions of refugees in a new country to be known as Pakistan. He survived the ordeal across the still-unmarked border, but he lost family and friends in the killings, expulsions and unimaginable acts of vengeance that accompanied the making of India and Pakistan. These episodes still haunt the subcontinent. My grandfather died four decades later at his home in Lahore. He never returned to his village 20 miles away in what became a different country. I thought often about his journey as I packed up two years of life in Delhi in preparation for my own, very different, Indian departure. My partner’s job had brought us there, and we returned to Washington this month. But despite the privilege of my U.S. passport, I lived in Delhi with the painful echoes of my grandfather’s partition. For almost two years, I lived as a Pakistani-born Muslim in Narendra Modi ’s Hindu- nationalist India . I knew that the experience would be dis...