Interiors
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By Katherine Sorrell
Delightful dressing rooms Elevate clothes storage to the next level with either a walk-in wardrobe or a dedicated dressing room. If you yearn for a tranquil, well-organised and spacious bedroom, the solution may be radical: create an entirely different space for storing clothes. Without wardrobes and chests of drawers cluttering up the room, it leaves a calm and attractive environment – essential for relaxation and healthy sleep. If your home’s floorplan allows, you could opt for the ultimate luxury: a large, separate dressing room, containing conventional clothes storage with hanging space and drawers plus a dressing table and mirror, and perhaps island storage, display shelves and comfortable seating. However, even when space is restricted it may be possible to convert a small bedroom, part of a large landing or one end of a bathroom or the master bedroom into a walk-in wardrobe packed with efficiently designed storage. Planning the space The best place to site a dressing room or walk-in wardrobe is adjoining the bedroom or bathroom; perhaps leading conveniently from one to the other (provided your clothes storage is protected from
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steam and damp). Size-wise, one convention says that each person needs a 60cm-deep hanging space that’s 2m high and at least 1.1m wide, plus a 55cm run of drawers – and adjacent floor space of at least 1.2m in which to get dressed. This does depends on what clothes you own and how you wish to store them, and whether or not you’d like to keep things like bedlinens, coats, suitcases, hats and blankets here, too. It’s best to measure everything that you’re planning to put in the dressing room, then draw up plans and elevations on squared paper of where and how it could be built, allowing for doors, windows and radiators. In terms of fitting the room out, it’s mainly a case of hanging versus folding. Most people opt for a combination of the two. There is a plethora of options, including rails for full-, half- and three-quarter-length hanging, deep, shallow and compartmentalised drawers, and useful fittings such as tie holders, pull-out shelves, boxes, trouser hangers and laundry bins. The hard-to-reach top parts of the space can be employed for items that
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