Remodeling · 6 min read
Custom Closets: What Makes Them Worth It
A closet system is not about looking tidy in a photograph. It is about the fact that a single rail and a shelf wastes most of the volume you paid for.
Published · 11 North Inc
A standard closet is one rail with a shelf above it. Everything below the hanging clothes is dead air, and in a full-height closet that is most of the space you are paying to heat.
What a fitted system actually recovers
The gain comes from double hanging. Shirts, jackets and folded trousers need roughly half the height of a full-length garment, so a section of double rail stores twice as much in the same footprint. Add drawers where the dead space was, shelving sized to what you actually own, and shoe storage that is not a pile on the floor, and a typical closet holds far more without getting any bigger. That is the whole argument, and it is a practical one rather than an aesthetic one - though a fitted closet does also stop the room reading as clutter every time the door is open.
Older North Shore closets are the best candidates
Houses built before the middle of the last century were not designed around the volume of clothing people now own, and their closets are correspondingly small. That makes them the highest-return candidates for fitting out, because the difference between a badly used small closet and a well-used one is proportionally enormous. It also means measuring properly matters more, since those closets are frequently not square, and a system built to nominal dimensions will not fit.
Beyond the bedroom
The rooms where built-in storage pays most are often not bedrooms. A mudroom with proper lockers, hooks at the right height and a bench turns the messiest part of a Chicago-area house into something that works through winter. A laundry room with counter and hanging space stops laundry migrating to the kitchen table. A pantry fitted to actual can and box heights holds far more than adjustable wire shelving spaced for nothing in particular. Home offices carved out of a spare bedroom benefit the same way.
What to think about before designing
Inventory what you own rather than designing for what you imagine. How many long garments genuinely need full height, how much folded storage you need, how many pairs of shoes. A closet designed around real quantities is a different design from one built to a standard layout. Also decide who uses it: a shared closet with two people of different heights wants different rail heights on each side, which costs nothing extra if it is decided at the drawing stage. Our custom closets page covers what we build, and cabinetry covers the built-ins that go elsewhere in the house.