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.

The typically busy spring season for the housing market was a dud, and the summer isn’t looking much brighter.

Housing services companies like Zillow Group and Rocket RKT +3.78% were loud and clear last week on earnings calls: Rocket CEO Varun Krishna called the quarter through June “one of the toughest spring housing markets in years.”

Jeremy Hofmann, Zillow’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call that the company predicted earlier this year that the market for mortgages would be flat. “We actually now think it’s going to be down low-to-mid-single digits,” he said.

The rest of 2026 will remain challenging for mortgage origination volume, says KBW analyst Bose George. The question now is what happens in 2027. “If mortgage rates remain [around] 6.75%, I think that’s going to be challenging even for next year,” he says.

But what’s bad news for mortgage companies could be a positive for bargain hunters. Buyers can expect prices to grow more slowly—or mildly decline—with less competition as long as mortgage rates remain unpredictable.

Mortgage rates at the beginning of the year were solidly below year-ago levels, notes Zillow senior economist Kara Ng. But they surpassed last year’s levels recently, she adds, referencing Freddie Mac’s weekly survey of 30-year fixed mortgage rates. Last week’s reading, at 6.69%, was higher than year-ago levels for the first time in 2026.

“From the affordability point of view, it’s going to get more challenging in the second half of the year,” she says. “And when affordability gets more challenging, that impacts sales and home price appreciation.”

Mortgage application data tracked by the Mortgage Bankers Association has cooled since the beginning of the year. The trade group expects that the number of mortgage originations in the remaining two quarters will lag behind last year’s levels, after exceeding 2025 levels in the first half.

Rocket’s early-stage data—which the company told Barron’s it derives from its brokerage Redfin, demand for its mortgage products, and signs in its servicing portfolio that a homeowner is preparing to refinance or move—“leads us to expect the third quarter mortgage market to be smaller than the second,” Chief Financial Officer Brian Brown, said on the company’s call. He added that such an occurrence is “something the industry has not seen since 2022.”

Prices will be about flat nationally, Ng says. Zillow’s most recent forecast, which shows how values are expected to change in the year ending June 2027, show them dropping in roughly half of the 100 largest U.S. metros for which data is available.

Buyers aren’t rushing in at a time when mortgage costs are rising and unpredictable. But those with the right combination of patience and cash could stand to benefit. “If you are financially qualified to buy a starter home, you are facing less competition and you’re more likely to get a price cut,” Ng says.