I love designing a space that is both beautiful and functional. I’d love to share some of my designs with you! I hope you are inspired, and it brings about creativity as you think about your next design project.
Have you considered redesigning your closet? Or have you recently purchased a house that needs a closet overhaul?
I have done extensive research and designed quite a few closets over the years and have a few tricks up my sleeve that I’d love to share with you.
Do you need space for shoes? There are many other options besides throwing your shoes in a big box or stacking them on the floor in your closet. A shoe shelf brings me so much joy. I can see all my shoes laid out nicely and can organize them by type! Whenever I am designing a closet, I never opt for angled shoe shelves. They may look nice, but if you are anything like me, you have a lot of shoes and need to maximize space. Angled shoe shelves take up more space, and I’ve learned I can fit more shoes in a level shelf:
Another fun thing to do in your closet is to add lighting. You want to go into a well-lit closet, not a dark and dreary room. When you’re doing shelving in a closet, LED lights are great to put on the underside of the shelves. A trick I have learned is if you cannot afford LED lighting, another great option would be to place a mirror behind all the shelves. It not only makes the space look bigger but doing this brightens up the room and the shelving very nicely.
Adjustable shelving is also a must! You don’t want to limit your options for shoe placement. So if you decide you want to put tall boots on the bottom and flip-flops on the next row you can adjust the shelves accordingly.
If you have a few go-to purses and bags that you use consistently, making space for these will help with decision making and ensure you aren’t using the same purse over and over again. If you see them, you’ll use them.
Below, you can see the section for purses I designed in of one my closets. I was not able to do adjustable shelving because the contractor placed LED lighting horizontally. This ended up being a frustration for me in the end. As I bought larger sized-bags I could not fit them in this area. When designing a space like this, the solution would be to use vertical LED lighting with adjustable shelves. This will create a space that will allow for lighting in that area if you would like, but you can still adjust the shelves.
In another one of my closets, I was able to have more space for my larger purses, but unlike the picture above, I opted for no lighting. I simply placed mirror behind to give the impression of more space. It still looks bright and beautiful, and in the end was a huge money saver.
Here is that same area for purses close-up and the beautiful hardware on the drawers:
Here is that full side of the closet. I love the space and the organization! You can see that there is no shelve lighting but the mirrors in the back of the closet give the appearance of more space and still brightens up the closet significantly:
See the holes on the sides in the picture below? There’s my adjustable shelving. It gives me so much joy! There is joy in freedom!
While I’m on the subject of adjustable shelving, below is another example of adjustable shelving. Our contractor told us that we could not have shelving in this space because of the shape of the room, however, I believe in the value of storage everywhere so I am very happy with how this turned out:
You can see these adjustable shelves are part of a beautiful white lacquer cabinet and it looks fantastic in this space:
If you need more space, adding a double hanger will give you twice the amount of room to hang your clothes. In the image below, you can see that I did not put LED lighting in each section of the closet as it gets very pricey. If you choose to use a double hanging option, make sure you account for those long dresses. I often find that if you get carried away with double hanging, you will find yourself with no space to accommodate those longer items.
Another great idea for closet rods is to buy the rod itself with lighting already installed. This is another closet where I used this trick for lighting along with a full length mirror in the back. Here is what that looks like with a full-length space for long dresses:
I’d love to hear your experience with designing and organizing closets. What’s your favorite thing about the closet you currently have? What is more important to you: function or aesthetics?
I have many rooms that I’ll share in the future, I hope this inspires you to get designing/organizing!
Christine