Need More Closet Space? 6 Chic Interior Design Solutions

In the series How to Live With a Room You Hate, we ask design pros to solve everyday interior problems.

A ROOM with little or no closet space can leave you feeling bulldozed by your own belongings. “It’s unsettling when nothing has a home. Creating a system that maximizes your space can change your whole mood,” said Jamie Garson of Better Than B4, a custom organizing service in Manhattan. Here, six stuff-stowing techniques that offer relief when a bedroom is bereft of storage.

1. Increase Your Screen Time

When Gavin Smith, an architect with Perkins + Will, turned an attic space in his 1910 Craftsman home in Seattle into a bedroom for himself and his wife, he wanted to leave the space open and airy. So rather than building a traditional closet, he constructed cabinetry and clothing racks under the cathedral ceiling and shielded them behind a peek-a-boo screen of cedar slats supported by chic, blackened steel. “A solid drywall would be perceived very differently,” he said. “Because the screen is see-through, it creates a sense of depth.” Smith gave the partition—which also serves as a place to hang a flat-screen TV—a walnut stain to match a nearby dresser. If you want to skip construction, suggests Garson, tuck belongings behind a standing room divider.

2. Play Dress-Up

Interior designer Emilie Jacob gave a closet-less child’s bedroom in Dubai a clever theatrical fix by installing rods to hang clothing, many at a low level, and suspending drapes that, with a pull, can hide them on a whim. The drapes delineate a dressing area that lets the little girl don her duds in privacy. The curtains begin where a modular IKEA bed with underbed storage and attached wardrobe leaves off. “The linen curtains are really light, and there are no cords,” said Jacob, who founded local design firm Stella + the Stars and collaborated with Studio Tsubi, also in Dubai, on the room. “Any child can pull them open or closed.”

3. Broker a Separate Piece

When bad luck or circumstance has robbed you of a closet, a free-standing wardrobe makes for a classic solution. One with many benefits, contends Russell Pinch, the owner of Pinch, a furniture and lighting design firm in London. “It’s an investment…but one you can take with you.”

Freestanding wardrobes can solve the storage dilemma – and you can take them with you when you leave. Credit: Getty Images

And importing a wardrobe rather than constructing storage can be kinder to architecturally valuable spaces, like the bedroom in Pinch’s vacation home in Charente-Maritime, France, in an 18th-century structure that was originally a cow barn. “We wanted to preserve the….beautiful parquet floors and timbered ceilings,” he said. “A built-in would have dominated the architecture and reduced the size of the room.” The white wardrobe, which he designed, “is an elegant solution. It looks like plaster-relief work,” said Pinch. Next to the wardrobe a full-length mirror with drawers at the bottom offers additional storage and helps complete a dressing area.

4. Get a Side Hustle

In a London townhouse, local interior designer Andrea Benedettini fit a full-size bed into a relatively narrow room, and rather than flank it with nightstands used the tight space on either side to build matching full-height closets. Unwilling to forgo the benefits of traditional bedside tables, he hung sconces on the sides of the closets facing the bed and carved out niches (complete with concealed lighting) to create a ledge for a book, phone or water glass. “Simple design details like the niche elevate the design,” Benedettini said. “Applying a fabric to the closet door and bespoke bronze hardware helped create a calming and luxurious space.” A ceiling-height upholstered headboard bridges the closets, connecting them visually into a whole, so the bed appears to be tucked into its own soft alcove.

5. Let It Rock

According to organiser Garson, much of our wardrobes can live outside a closet quite nicely. She suggests openly displaying an amazing sneaker collection in a media unit, placing funky handbags on floating shelves or arranging hooks on a wall for an artful pattern of hats or scarves.

6. Let It Roll

For a bedroom with no closet, Hilary Matt lets it all hang out with a rolling rack for clothes. The trick to exhibiting your wardrobe (warning: this is not for slobs)? “Keep the [rest of the] décor clean and monochromatic so the room doesn’t feel cluttered,” said the Manhattan interior designer.

Open clothes racks can work well as long as they are kept tidy. Credit: Getty Images

The pop of colour from the apparel, which needs to be well-organized, adds to the room’s scheme “like a piece of art,” she said. Organiser Garson favours racks that match the style of the room, whether made of a fun acrylic or the more-masculine matte black metal.

James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.

The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.

Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.

The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.

For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.

But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.

Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.

New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”

Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.

And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”

Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.

“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.

From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.

Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.

Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.

In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.

A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.

“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.

The Patterson family’s basement retreat ‘encapsulates the joy in the things that we love in one room.’ John Cole

Screen-Free ‘Escapes’

“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”

Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.

Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.

“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”

A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.

Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.

Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.

“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.

As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.

“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”

Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.

The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.

When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”

Analog Accessories

Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?

“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.

Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”

More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.

For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.

Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.

Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.

“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.

In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.

Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.

The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.

Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.

The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”