Why we start every project with the closets
The least glamorous rooms in the house tell us the most about how a family lives, and they decide whether the beautiful rooms stay beautiful.
Draft post, for review and voice edits.
On the first walk-through of any project, before I look at the living room, I ask to see the closets. Clients find this odd. It is the most useful ten minutes of the whole job.
Closets do not lie
A living room is staged for company, even unconsciously. A closet is the truth. It tells me how much you own, what you actually wear, whether things have a home or a pile, and how much storage the house is short by. Every one of those facts changes the design of the rooms you do want to talk about.
Storage is what keeps a finished room finished
The reason so many beautiful rooms drift back into clutter is not discipline. It is that the beautiful room was designed without a place for the things that live in it. The mail, the chargers, the dog leash, the school forms. If they have nowhere to go, they go on the console, and the console stops being a console. We design the hiding places before we design the showing places.
It changes the floor plan
Once we know a family is short two closets' worth of storage, that becomes a design problem with real solutions: a built-in in the hallway, a deeper pantry, a mudroom carved out of a too-large entry, a window seat that opens. None of those happen if the conversation starts with sofa shapes.
It is also where trust gets built
Showing a stranger your closets is vulnerable. Being met with a plan instead of judgment is how a client relationship actually starts. By the time we get to the living room, we are already working together.
If you suspect your house has good bones and a storage problem, that is exactly the kind of thing The Consultation uncovers in the first walk-through.
