Ever Think Helping Your Kids Could Be A Smart Business Move?

(Photography by Don Kadair: Dee Keller)

Dee Keller decided to help style her daughter's Texas dorm room for her and her roommates which led to an entire business line for this Baton Rouge Designer! Moving into a dorm room can be a jarring experience for a college student. After all, dormitories don’t have a reputation for being the homiest environment.

So when Dee Keller, a Baton Rouge-based interior designer, prepared to send her oldest daughter to college more than 400 miles away in Austin, Texas, she wanted to make her daughter’s new home as comfortable as possible.

Drawing on her 20 years of experience designing homes, Keller worked with her daughter—and her daughter’s three roommates—to design a customized room that reflected their tastes, interests and personalities, and to give them a place that felt like home amid all of the life changes they were experiencing.

The room was a hit, not only with Keller’s daughter, Brighton, and her roommates, but with other dorm residents and friends.

“Everyone wanted to see what she’d done to the room,” Brighton Keller says.

Dee Keller likely did not imagine that her maternal instinct to make her daughter comfortable would lead to a successful new niche for her interior design business, Dee Keller Designs.

But that’s exactly what happened. Today Keller works with students who live in all types of collegiate housing—dorms, apartments, sorority houses—at 10 universities, including LSU and other Southeastern Conference schools and schools in Texas. And her client list and universities where she works continues to expand.

Daily Report has the full story