Why Bedroom Closets?

November 27th, 2021
house
Bedrooms, at least in the US, are nearly always constructed with built-in closets, but I don't see why? What's the appeal?

Personally, I don't like them. I want the flexibility to arrange furniture however currently best suits my needs, and a built-in closet permanently reserves a portion of the floor area. Stand-alone wardrobes also offer flexibility when occupants vary in how much stuff they have that is a good fit for a closet.

When we were adding dormers to our house four years ago we needed to decide whether to include closets in each of the rooms. Here's what the three new/expanded bedrooms looked like with and without closets:

Anna's bedroom

What will be Nora's bedroom once she's out of our room. Currently my office and where I sleep for the second half of the night.

Lily's bedroom

We decided to construct all three without closets, and in retrospect we're both very happy with that decision: each of the three has the bed in a position that wouldn't be possible if we had kept the closets.

(Sometimes people will say that it doesn't matter whether you like closets, building code requires them. This is a myth: the International Residential Code (IRC) says nothing about bedroom closets. And our building inspector had no issues with our closetless bedrooms.)

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Donation recommendations for effective altruists (July 2026)

My recommendation for donors who are American citizens or permanent residents is that they donate directly to high-value political candidates.

via Thing of Things July 22, 2026

Let's Taboo the V-Word

Read this post on Substack.

via Home July 12, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

more     (via openring)