Consumer Articles
Closet Considerations
Written: 5/12/2009
Jeffrey Artz, Director of Design
During a recent review of a plan we were looking to build, I found myself reviewing the closets in the house as a way to maximize room sizes. The more I stared at the drawings, the more I came to realize that closets serve more than a place to store items, be it clothing or kitchen staples. Ultimately, a good designer will use closets for storage, but also for noise control, traffic flow, and at a minimum, for the use of filling dead space with a desirable feature.
Utilizing a closet to buffer the noisy area, whether it is side-by-side bedrooms for your children or an adjacent bathroom that fosters middle of the night flushing, can control noise control. Consider a bedroom on the northwest corner of the house that battles howling winter winds. A properly designed closet not only helps to buffer the outside noise, but can also act as an insulator for the bedroom that always feels a few degrees cooler during the winter months.
Traffic flow can be controlled simply by thinking about the location of closets on the first or second floor of a home. The proper location can encourage a visitor to head into the dining room, or help them find a powder room when the closet is adjacent and oriented properly.
Dead spaces occur more frequently than homebuyers realize especially if they are looking at a home that is already constructed to the point of drywall. These spaces, when considered in advance, can be utilized for linen or small convenience closets rather than just unused dead space. Whether the closet is used for off season coats and jackets, or for that unsightly bulk pack of toilet paper, the more storage space you can obtain, the less clutter you’ll have in your home.
Finally, I want to discuss the issue of clothing and pantry storage. 95% of our customers request that their new kitchen pantries be walk-ins and that all bedrooms should have walk-in closets. Considering the other functions a closet can serve, especially noise buffering, the following information and sketch may surprise you. An average walk-in closet is 5’x5’ (or 28 s.f. including walls) and a shallow style closet w/ hinged or bi-fold doors is typically 2’x7’ (or 16.8 s.f. including walls). Based on the sketch below, you can see that both closets hold the same linear amount of clothing due to dead space in the corner of the walk-in closet. Now consider that on an average four-bedroom home, with three of the rooms utilizing a standard closet in lieu of a walk-in saves a total of 33.6 s.f. An average third bath in a home utilizes as little as 40 s.f. which is basically 6 s.f. more than the saved space of standard closets.
Should you find yourself designing your new home with Hogan and Herr or another builder, consider that utilizing standard closets will allow for the same storage space and allow enough square footage savings to tuck in a small third bath. This is just one of the numerous ideas Hogan and Herr offers as we help a new homebuyer design their dream home. If you are currently developing ideas for a new home, feel free to email me with questions or to set up a meeting to discuss having Hogan and Herr design and build your new home. Having built numerous homes, we have many ideas and examples of useful tips and design features that you may not have considered to date.
Best of luck with the design or remodel of your new home!