The Next Big Thing: Your Closet was written by Susan Schwartz and originally published in The Gazette.
Ingrid Ulrich is the kind of person who is irritated by messiness; clutter stresses her out. When the only place for the chartered accountant to hang clothes she’d selected to wear to work the following day was from a knob on her husband’s dresser, it drove her nuts. When her husband, banker Ron Handfield, would empty his pockets on the dresser at the end of the workday, that bugged her, too. So did having to hunt for shoes under her suits in the reach-in closet in the Beaconsfield couple’s master bedroom – a closet hung with two sagging poles.
A custom-designed closet, where everything would have its place, had long been on her wish list. It became a reality when the couple and their three young children moved recently to a larger home with a good-size walk-in closet off the master bedroom. They dismantled the makeshift poles and shelves left by the previous owners and painted. Then Ulrich called in California Closets, a company that creates custom closets.
She was expecting questions about how many shelves they wanted in their new closet, but what designer Tara Markus asked first was about their routine, where they put and store things. “It was much more about how we live and what is important to us,” Ulrich said. “I thought the first thing she would do was measure. It was, in fact, the last.”
Consumers like Ulrich and Handfield are turning in unprecedented numbers to custom-designed storage solutions for their closets – solutions featuring double-hung rods, shelves and drawer space intended to maximize space and to make sure the things they use most are the most accessible. Many are spending hundreds, even thousands, in the hope that, once their closets function more efficiently, so will they.
The closet and storage industry is exploding in North America. Americans alone spent about $2 billion on custom closets in 2006, according to estimates by a new trade association set up last year, the Association of Closet and Storage Professionals, 20 percent more than the previous year.
And the business of custom closets has become much more than just building shelves. Organized closets say the people who sell custom-designed closets, make people feel more in control of their lives. What they’re selling is the promise of serenity.
“We want for our home to be a place of calm, a place to really have time to live in the moment a bit more, a place where we want to connect with the people we love,” said Lianne Deckelbaum, co-owner with her husband, Mitch, of the Montreal franchise of California Closets, the world’s largest custom closet company, “And when our home is organized, it creates greater opportunity for that to happen.”
The couple’s new closet features everything from a vide-poche a drawer with compartments into which Handfield empties his pockets each evening, to a separate section for shoes and a valet rod on which to hang the clothes Ulrich has set out for work the next day, plus enough shelves that her sweaters don’t fall over the way they used to.
She loves it. And her husband, who started out thinking that a closet was “just a closet,” now says it’s his favourite room in the house.
He’s not the only one. “The era of closets and organizing them has arrived,” said Glenn Roberston of Pointe Claire-based Glenn Roberston Closet Design, who estimates that his business, which is 90 percent bedroom closets, has doubled in the past five years. “We have seen huge increases,” he said. “It just kind of caught fire.
“I think people had to do their kitchens first, then their bathrooms,” he said, before turning their attention to their closets.
A holy trinity of domestic obsession, the New York Times has called it.
Several reasons. One is a trend toward bedrooms with minimal furniture so that nearly everything has to be in the closet. Most new houses come with huge closets, often sold empty or minimally outfitted. And older baby boomers downsizing from houses to apartments and condos have a good deal less space for their possessions. They’d better be organized.
“There are a couple of key things you need to have in order in your house,” said Roberston. “One is your kitchen. The other is your closet. And it’s hard to have order in a closet that has one pole sagging in the middle, shoes piled at the bottom and one shelf at the top so you forget what you have, your clothes are all crammed together – and you have to iron something before you can wear it.”
There’s also resale value to consider. A closet you’re proud to show off makes a house show better, just as a messy, bulging closet risks killing a sale.
And television programs with names like Neat, Clean Sweep and Mission Organization have raised people’s awareness about the merits of organizing – this in a society in which people shop as entertainment, in which some fashion stores bring in new merchandise twice weekly, in which we are driven by terms like “new” and “more” and we are swamped with stuff.
Because nature abhors a vacuum, our acquisitive natures and our harried lives have spawned entire industries to help us find refuge from the disorder of our closets – and our lives.
The demand for professional organizers, who generally go into people’s homes and help them to declutter, has increased so much that their association, Professional Organizers in Canada, which had fewer than 100 members in the fall of 2002, has more than 500 today.
In the same way that raised-panel cabinets and granite countertops came to be a part of kitchen design, custom closet design is evolving to include such features as crown mouldings and even granite-covered islands. People are prepared to spend more today on their custom-designed closets, said Viviane Djandji of Au Printemps, which has been designing and installing custom closets since 1981. And there are more choices. “People want more drawers and molded fronts and more accessories. They want all sorts of things – and they have much bigger closets.”
“Ten years ago there was white melamine,” said Deckelbaum. “Now there is a whole aesthetic component. As closets become more a part of the decor, people pick different colours and finishes.”
A customized storage system can be designed to accommodate most budgets. An 8-foot reach-in closet in basic white melamine, for instance, can cost as little as $800 and the average price of a closet with a small walk-in space is about $2,500. But a good-size walk-in with built-ins can easily cost $5,000 or more, depending on what people need – or want.
The built-ins in Ulrich and Handfield’s 5-by-7-foot custom closet, for instance, are a rich chocolate brown, and the shelves are bull-nosed or rounded instead of flat. The hardware is brushed nickel. It looks lovely. But what they like most about the closet is how it helps them be more organized and, by extension, makes life less stressful. Which, to them, makes it worth the $4,000 it cost.
People who design closet spaces, like any home space, learn things about their clients few other people know – like where they undress when they get home and how they start their day. “There is a sense of sharing a personal part of your life that is perhaps more than with a typical salesperson,” said Deckelbaum of California Closets.
As a result, many customers come to feel a personal connection with their closet designers because they seem to understand so well what they want – much of their job, after all, is about listening – and see them as people who make a big difference in their lives.
Professional organizer Linda Chu, a board member of Professional Organizers in Canada, issues this caveat, however: “Closet organizing companies give you the infrastructure, but not necessarily the operating manual.”
They can help you to achieve order, she said. But maintaining that order? Now there’s a horse of a different colour.
If you need help managing your custom closet, contact Linda Chu at the Out of Chaos website or by email at info@outofchaos.ca or by phone at 604-813-8189.
