“You need a wall of shoes.”
That was the first thing my friend Jason, the owner the NYC bar, The Wayland, when he saw the sad looking closet area in our new Brooklyn apartment. Jason designed his award-winning bar (DailyCandy even declared it the best bar in the country for 2013) from reclaimed materials, such as flooring from a school gym that was torn down a few blocks away and even a wine casket that creates the perfect sculptural rest for bar snacks. When he said he would help design my closet, I was all ears.
I knew that the reach-in closet in our garden-level bedroom wouldn’t be enough room for this stylist’s wardrobe, so I originally had a popular closet company come in to design and estimate for a walk-in closet to be created around this space. When I found out that they wanted to charge me $1500 to put up shelves and that didn’t even include the wall, door, moving the lights, etc., I gave those blueprints to Jason and we came up with a game plan—and of course, scrapped all of their plans. Here’s what we came up with:
This is the same wall as the pre-existing reach-in closet, but we decided to raise the bar (literally and figuratively) and include a second bar for my pants to get more out of the space.
Jason came up with the idea of partitioning the left-hand side for my longer items like dresses and gowns.
To the right you can see there’s shelving we created for my sweaters, hats and even a cubbie for my sunglasses.
The plan is to share this closet with the hubby, but of course it was devised more with my needs in mind (oops), as he tends to shove his daily wardrobe into drawers and shelves. We created a long bar for his nicer clothing to hang and one big shelf for him to throw his pants on at the end of the day, which is right above this nook that we customized for our hamper unit to tuck into. Brilliant, right?
It wouldn’t be a stylist’s closet without a wall for shoes. Jason told his contractor to create different sizes based on my shoe heights and they actually measured my shoes to fit! What they didn’t account for where the ridiculous amount of handbags I own, so I had them stop adding shelves to fit them.
Somehow the hubby’s wardrobe is going to fit in here (to the left), but no one will be looking at that when there’s a wall of shoes!
