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Beyond the Closet — 21st Century Storage Solutions
For less than the cost of a closet full of organizers you can replace your closet with a super-efficient wardrobe wall.
In olden days, before central heating and running water, houses did not have closets. A row of pegs next to the door was enough storage for all the clothing in the household. Closets were actually discouraged by government policy. Prior to the American Revolution, property taxes were levied by the British Crown on each room in a house. Closets counted as rooms, so, since no-one wanted to pay the "closet tax", there were very few closets. A wardrobe wall...

White Wardrobe •   Takes up no more floor space than the reach-in closet it replaces,

•   Provides up to four times the amount of well-organized storage,

•   Costs no more than a closet full of organizers, and

•   Is a striking addition to any room, enhancing the resale value of the house.

Even after the closet tax was repealed most families did not have enough clothing to really need special rooms for storage. A chest, some pegs, an armoire or two were all that were needed. The very rich in their mansions had closets, but for the average household closets did not begin to appear regularly until the late 19th century. By then the industrial revolution had made good quality, relatively inexpensive clothing widely available, and articles in newspapers and magazines were already starting to complain about closet clutter. Walnut wardrobe wall An entire wall of storage hidden behind handsome American walnut doors. This wardrobe wall replaced a small reach-in closet, providing over 300% more well-organized storage in the same small space.

By the 1950s, creeping closet clutter had inspired the last major closet innovation — the walk-in closet. A great improvement over the small, reach-in closet the walk-in quickly became an indispensable adjunct to the master bedroom (also a post-War innovation). Throughout the 1970's and '80's it was almost impossible for a builder to sell a new house without an ever larger walk-in closet.

We have now reached the point at which walk-in closets have evolved into sumptious rooms, far beyond just places to store stuff, and even beyond mere dressing areas — the latest master closets feature his and her vanities, dressing tables, sofas and chairs, televisions, spas, saunas — even steam showers. In many upscale homes, the master bath and closet have largely merged into the master bedroom becoming one continuous and often luxurious master suite.

Thinking Outside the Closet
A Reach-in Closet A typical small reach-in closet. If your closet looks like this, it's time to get some help. The rest of us, however, especially those of us who live in and love old houses, are still stuck with those tiny reach-in closets. They may occupy one whole end of the bedroom, hidden behind graceless rows of bi-fold doors. More often, they are dark little recesses stuck in one corner the room behind a narrow door. Half of the clothing stored in them is pushed into corners where it cannot be easily seen or reached. Anything stuck on the upper shelf is lost in "twilight zone" of the closet.

To improve on closet storage, an entire new industry has been born. The closet organizing industry. It is huge and getting bigger. The Department of Commerce estimates that Americans spent $4 billion on home storage in 2004 — most of it on closet organization. Scads of new companies enter the business every year. Everyone is getting into the act from Sam's Club for DIY closet storage to Mommy Organizers, a new franchise opportunity that may well become the Amway of the 21st century.

Closet organization can indeed work wonders — greatly increasing the storage capacity of a basic closet. But there is a limit to what closet organizer folks can do because they think "closet". Their designs are limited to what can be made to work inside a typical closet.

We, by contrast, don't think "closet", we think "storage". Maybe a closet is the best storage solution for wardrobe organization, or maybe not. Reach-in closets have serious structural problems that have no real solution. So, for the most effective wardrobe storage, the first step may be to recognize that the closet may not be the best solution to clothes storage and open our minds to some alternatives. Think "outside the closet". In fact, think about getting rid of the closet for something better.

What's Wrong With My Closet? Cabinet door Cabinet doors are especially designed for easy reach-in access. Standard room doors used on closets are not.
Everyone knows there is something very wrong with the typical small closet. It is not very convenient storage. It's usually poorly lighted with lots of dark places and shadows. Clothes get tangled, fall to the floor, are seemingly always out of sight or reach. There is no good place for shoes, belts or ties.

The problem is the closet door.

Access to your reach-in closet is limited by the size of its door. Closet doors are people doors, not cabinet doors. Cabinet doors are designed to fully expose all of the contents of a cabinet for easy reach-in access. Room doors are Closet Blind Areas Closet doors create blind areas at the sides of the closet that restrict visibility and access. If pullouts are installed, doors limit pullouts to the doorway opening — the shoulders cannot be used and become largely inaccessible dark holes once pullouts are installed. Bifold doors are worse and bypass (sliding) doors are even more restrictive. intended to let people walk from one room to another. They are not reach-in friendly. They are always smaller than the wall that contains them because of the way they must be installed. This means that there is always some part of the closet (primarily at the top and sides) you cannot easily reach or even see. You can access only the parts of the closet exposed through the door opening.

There is no real solution to the problem of the closet door. Any effort to make a closet truly efficient storage is certain to be confounded by the door. No matter what is done, any storage above the top of the door opening or at the hidden sides of the closet is destined to stay fairly useless.

Walk-In Closet Plan To add 60% more storage space, a walk-in closet requires 200% more floor space. Not a good tradeoff where bedroom space is already at a premium. The door drastically restricts the placement of drawers and pullouts. The only space available to pull into is the doorway, so the practical limit of any pullout device whether it is a drawer, basket or shelf, is the doorway width. The rest of the closet might as well not be there.

If a closet is filled with pullouts then the side areas become inaccessible dark pits — graveyards for coins, cufflinks and dropped hangers. As much as 1/4th to 1/3rd of the closet floor space becomes unusable, largely offsetting any storage gain from using pullouts in the first place.

One solution is, of course, the walk-in closet. In a walk in closet, the door reverts to its normal function — letting people walk in and out. It is no longer a porthole to the contents of the closet. Walk-in closets were invented to overcome the more obvious limitations of reach-in closets. The price you pay, however, is that walk-in closets take up a lot more bedroom floor space. The minimum depth of a reach-in closet is 2 feet (we use 25"), for a walk-in closet the minimum depth is a whopping 6 feet (7 feet is better) to allow for walk space. Walk space itself is not storage space, it is just a pathway to storage space. If you have the abundant space required, then a well-designed walk-in closet may indeed be the answer to your storage needs.

Replacing the Reach-In Closet — The Wardrobe Wall
But a better solution for most homes — especially older homes — is a space-conserving wardrobe wall. In a wardrobe wall, the restrictive closet doors are replaced by cabinet doors and drawers for easy access to stored items. To see how it works, le't design a wardrobe wall to replace a typical reach-in closet.

Storage Requirements
The first thing we do it get rid of the front closet wall and its doors. This eliminates the blind areas and reveals the space we have to work with. Next, let's remove the rods and shelves and start adding modules for specific storage needs. Here is what we need to store in an average wardrobe closet:

   •    Hanging clothes (overcoats, suits, shirts, blouses and pants)
The Closet With Front Wall and Doors Removed
Closet Elevation The view of the closet once the wall and doors are removed. At least we can now see what's in the closet. Notice how much space was wasted.    •    Folded clothes (men's shirts, sweaters, sweats, underwear)
   •    Socks and hose
   •    Purses, shoes and boots
   •    Small stuff (handkerchiefs, cufflinks, jewelry)
   •    Ties and belts.

Let's start with hanging clothes. Unless your name is Shaquille O'Neil, you will need 68-75" of hanging space for full length coats and dresses, 60-63" for street dresses, and 42-45" for suits, blouses, skirts and pants.

A hanging rod about 80" from the floor is about right for most of us. Much higher and it's out of reach. Much lower and it crowds good storage space below that we can use for other things. To accommodate an 80" rod, we want about 84" of vertical space. This just happens to be the height of a normal full-height cabinet. Isn't that a nice coincidence?

We don't own a lot of floor-length clothing. The days of ball gowns are pretty much past. Full-length overcoats are often stored in the entry closet rather than the bedroom. So this space can be fairly narrow - or even eliminated if it does not fit your life style. We can easily hang 4 overcoats or 12 gowns in a 20" space. So that's what we will use here.

Street dresses require about 1-1/4" of rod space each to hang without crushing. We can easily store 20 dresses in a 24" space. If you have more than 20 dresses to hang, then we need to make the space bigger. Since we design the space to fit your specific storage requirements, we will provide as much storage for street dresses as you need. Our Design Sketch for a Wardrobe Wall in the Same Space
Closet Elevation Our wardrobe wall provides nearly three times the storage in the same floor space as the reach-in closet, organizes clothing effectively, and ensures easy, fumble-free, access to all of the items in the various storage modules.

Shirts, pants, blouses and similar types of clothing also require about 1-1/4" of rod space for each garment. Most of us have a lot of this kind of clothing. So we are going to allocate a full 72" to their storage, for 50 such items.

None of these hanging items takes up the full 80" of vertical space available. So below the hanging space we have room for drawer and shelf storage. We can use drawers for folded clothing, socks, hose, and small items; and pull-out shelves for shoes and purses. We can make these as fancy or plain as you want. Dividers in shirt drawers keep folded shirts and sweaters nice and orderly. Cube dividers in underwear, sock and hose drawers make this storage more efficient. We like to line jewelry drawers with felt to prevent scratches. Dividers can be made of aromatic red cedar for that wonderful cedar smell, and to keep bugs out of the closet.

How much storage did we add? Triple the capacity of the former closet. And we did not use a single inch of additional bedroom floor space.

Dressing Up the Wardrobe
Now we need to dress up our storage modules a little. We don't want all of these clothes just hanging out in the bedroom. We want to conceal the storage with something that looks nice — that we can close when things in the closet get a little untidy.

The Finished Wardrobe Wall
Finished birch and poplar wardrobe wall Panel doors conceal the hanging clothes and shoe trays. What looks like expensive cherrywood is actually ordinary tulipwood and birch with a multi-layer brown cherry finish. A light soffit closes off the space between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling. We can just leave this space open for displaying keepsakes, or add one more row of cabinets for additional storage. So let's add some good-looking doors to the hanging and shoe storage space. We don't need to add doors over the drawers since the contents of the drawers are already nicely concealed by the drawers themselves. (We think drawer-concealing doors are a complete waste of money and a serious handicap to efficiency. Why do we want to open a door, then a drawer to get something? See What We Can Learn about Kitchen Design from Commercial Kitchens for more discussion).

Using the Soffit Space
Finally we need to decide what to do with the last foot of space at the top of the cabinets. We can:
   •   Leave this open — it makes a nice shelf for displaying favorite items,
   •   Enclose it in a soffit (see illustration),
   •   Even add an additional row of cabinets to hold infrequently used items such as that Christmas sweater, or nonseasonal clothing: boots in the summer, sandals in the winter. It's not handy space. It's too high for daily use. But for stashing rarely used items, it's workable. We can even provide a cubby to conveniently store the small step-bench you will need to reach it (or you can stash the stool under the bed like most people).

Oops! We almost forgot about tie and belt storage. We can provide a divided drawer for ties and belts. But most people prefer hanging racks. We can attach racks to any of the wardrobe doors (ties and belts don't take up much space and will not interfere with the hanging clothing), or we can attach pullout racks to the side of any of the hanging clothes cabinets. Both are equally effective. It's just a matter of preference.

OK, now we're done.

Contact Us
If you are convinced by now that StarCraft Custom Builders is the proper choice to help you organize your storage needs, please contact us. We will be happy to help.

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