The amount of space you have in your home in general and your bedroom in particular is anything but standard. Some rooms will have lots of floor space and others little. Some will have high ceilings, while others, especially those in a converted loft space, will be very low. Both the horizontal and vertical dimensions will impact on what you can store there.
Given these variations in space, all of which have to work alongside everything else that you want to keep in the room (the most obvious, but not only variable being whether you have a single or double bed), a question has to be asked: Are you really best served by simply going down to the furniture shop and getting a free-standing wardrobe?
The answer must surely be no. The geometric shape and the fact that it is designed with no consideration for the dimensions of any room it will be placed in mean there are limitations to it. Wherever in the room you put it, the chances are there will be dead, unused room around it. Quite simply, this is not an efficient use of space, especially in a small home.
Here is where a DIY project can make all the difference. Using our online wardrobe builder tool, you can shape your own wardrobe to make the absolute most of your space, making it fit with the angles and dimensions of the room you have, not what a wardrobe factory has churned out.
The notion of making the most of limited space is a common one, either in a specific room or in the home in general. Home Esthetics, for instance, once published a list of 30 ways in which space could be maximised. Among these were smart storage ideas like floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, loads of shelves and utilising the space under the stairs.
When it came to the wardrobe options, there were two ideas. One was simply to have an open space to hang things, which may be feasible, but let’s be honest, is not very aesthetically pleasing.
However, it also suggested having a walk-in closet fitted underneath a lofted apartment. “No one says small apartments can’t have walk-in closets. It’s just a matter of utilising your space properly,” the article enthused. It even suggested creating a closet space that could be used as a walk-in working area.
Homes and Gardens had its own ideas for making the most of a small room. Some of these echoed the suggestions from Home Esthetics, such as the use of the space under the stairs, although it did not mention anything about wardrobes.
However, three other ideas it suggested could also be applied when you are designing your own wardrobe.
Firstly, there is the advice to “look to unused corners and nooks.” These, of course, are exactly the kinds of spaces that will remain unused when installing a free-standing wardrobe, unless you define ‘use’ as gathering cobwebs and losing things down the back that you will never find until the day you move out.
By designing a wardrobe that will fit into these spaces, often at unusual angles, you can make the best use of even a tiny nook, perhaps creating a little alcove for storing smaller items.
The second piece of advice was to “bend the rules to create interesting architectural details”. The article suggested this could involve details like more curves and fewer straight lines, but the joy of designing your own wardrobe is that you don’t just get to bend the rules, you get to decide what they are in the first place. The shape and style can be entirely what suits you.
Investing in “bespoke joinery” was the other suggestion that can be adapted as a principle for your wardrobe.
In the Home and Gardens article, the main application suggested (and illustrated by a photograph) involved the clever use of bookshelves to create a pause between a bedroom and dressing room in an otherwise open-plan design. But the idea of going ‘bespoke’, just like making your own design rules, has the advantage of almost infinite adaptability.
What you can take from this is that the overarching principle is that unorthodox homes require novel storage solutions. When space is at a premium, a creative approach can help you develop ways to make the best use of every nook and cranny in the home.
That can apply to many different aspects of the home and the things you want to keep in it, but when applied to a wardrobe, it can create the best of all worlds: something made from high-quality materials, designed to fit hand-in-glove into your home’s space, however large or small it is.
