A walk-in wardrobe is a dream come true for many. After years of having cramped, crowded wall closets, a space devoted to clothes and shoes where you can actually see everything you have feels and looks amazing. Yet that walk-in wardrobe can become a bear to deal with if it isn't planned correctly. If you're building one from scratch or have moved into a new home that you bought that has large wardrobe spaces, the sky's the limit in terms of what you can do. If you can't do that much customisation, you can still make the space look terrific.
Pull-Down Rods
A pull-down rod can be a wonderful addition if your wardrobe has existing shelves and you're not building the wardrobe from scratch. Sometimes one or two of the clothes rods for shirts – the ones in spaces that are above drawers – are placed just a little too low. There's room for the shirts, but you can't use the top of the drawers to hold anything because the clothing hung from the rod blocks it off. Pull-down rods install in the same holders as regular rods, but instead of being one horizontal rod, you have two vertical arms that hold a horizontal rod up higher in the space. That gives you extra room under the clothes and on top of the drawers for more storage. When you want to remove clothing, you pull the rod down and out toward you.
Space
Nothing makes a wardrobe look more terrible than having clothes crammed together on a hanging rod with so little room that you can barely move clothes aside to remove or add another hanger. One of the advantages of a walk-in wardrobe is that you should be able to spread things out. Rethink how you group clothes together so that you can hang them more evenly with more space in between each item. Instead of cramming all the shirts together on one rod, place all short-sleeved shirts in one area and long-sleeved in another. Corners can be particularly tricky, so maybe avoid hanging clothes there to ensure you don't end up with a mess. Also, take full advantage of the upper shelves in the wardrobe; crammed clothing rods and empty upper shelves simply look unbalanced.
Undershelf LED Lights
One way to create the illusion of more space, if you really don't have that much to work with, is to light the items in each cubby from the upper back corners. You can buy strips of LED lights that attach using adhesive to the undersides of the shelves in the back. These small lights eliminate the shadows at the back of the cubby and help illuminate the clothes, and when you see that light from the back, it can make the cubby look less crowded.
Ideally, you'd be able to have a wardrobe company custom-make an interior space for you with the right amount of drawers, rods and shelves – not to mention a luxurious chair and some jewellery storage spaces if possible. But even if you're just working with what you've got, you can turn that closet into a wardrobe to remember.