What to do if you have too much stuff and not enough storage space? Be happy about it. If you have very few closets and only a small space, storing some of your overflowing stuff in the open can be a good solution.
Well-planned open storage with wall shelves, pegs, hooks and other accessories does two important things: “It provides functionality,” says Natalie Papier, founder of the Charlotte, N.C., interior design firm Home Ec. and host of the reality TV show “Artfully Designed.” “And it looks like art when it’s hung on the wall.”
She and other designers will show you how to transform what might be considered clutter — sports equipment, personal mementos, out-of-season coats and boots, old books and records — into things you’ll want to show off.
Showcase your interests
Think of open storage as an opportunity to express yourself, especially when it comes to tricky items like guitars, bikes, and surfboards that are hard to cram into a closet.
For clients who owned multiple guitars, Papier did the obvious thing: She hung their guitars on the living room wall, front and center. “I thought, ‘This guitar means so much to you, and it’s something that makes you feel so unique, so why hide it in a closet?'” she says.
It’s easy to reach when it’s time to play, and “when someone walks in, they know right away who lives there,” she added.
For her vinyl record collector, she installed a shallow picture rail on the wall to create a place to display her favorite LPs. “Record covers are really art,” she said. “It’s fun to see what I have and rotate them over time.”
For another project, Papier hung a surfboard above his living room couch. The board was painted by Frankie Zombie as a permanent work of art, but Papier says you could do the same thing with an everyday surfboard.
Use wall hooks
Baseball caps and other personal accessories can quickly pile up and look cluttered, so Papier installed a series of evenly spaced wooden hooks on the wall of his son’s bedroom to organize his hat collection.
“My son can look at his favorite hats and pick them out,” she says, “but when he’s not wearing the hat, it looks like a work of art.”
Even if you don’t hang anything on it, wall hooks can still create an artistic display.
When New York-based designer Hilary Matt was designing the furnishings for a pool house in Elizaville, New York, she arranged round hooks of various sizes in an asymmetrical fashion that can hold almost anything, like a tote bag or a wet towel, but look like sculptural pieces when empty.
“I thought it was like a bubble,” she said.
Add a Peg Wall
Pegwall takes the idea of wall hooks a step further, creating a larger configuration with the flexibility to reposition hangers over time.
In a bachelorette apartment in Calgary, Canada, interior designer Rebecca St. John installed a floor-to-ceiling peg wall in an awkward foyer. Now the owner has a place to store bikes, helmets, and skis. She also installed a shelf that serves the same function as a hallway console.
“When I design small spaces, I often think about vertical arrangements, not just putting things on the floor,” St. John says. In this case, she adds, “I wanted it to be the center of an open-concept space, and I wanted it to be beautiful.”
Use multiple wall shelves
A single wall shelf can provide extra storage and display space, while multiple shelves can provide even more space.
Mariana Grynszpan, principal at New York design-build firm Mammoth, used wall shelving to dramatically expand the storage space in a compact alcove studio apartment near Manhattan’s Union Square.
She designed freeform shelving with clear acrylic shelves on custom metal brackets to create a breakfast bar area with dish storage in an underused foyer. Another group of shelves provides a place to store speakers, books, and CDs above a multifunction media center.
“In a small space, floor-to-ceiling wood units can feel claustrophobic,” Grynszpan says. “We were looking for something a little lighter.”
In another project, they used wall-mounted shelving units from Vitsoe in place of bedside tables, with further units installed in the living room to neatly store vintage stereo equipment, lamps and decorative items.
Create a cluster
Like many people, New York-based interior designer Ghislaine Viñas loves finding vintage pieces. “I love furniture, and I buy weird little pieces at thrift stores and garage sales,” she says. “It’s my job, but I often can’t find a place for it right away.”
Not knowing what to do with her collection of stools, trunks, and side tables, plus more books than would fit on her shelves, Viñas decided to combine them all into an artistic piece to hang on the wall. “I thought, ‘Look, I’ll put all these books and the different tables together and make a kind of collage,'” Viñas says.
The result is an orderly display of books stacked horizontally on various tables, above which hangs an artwork by her friend Alessandra Mortola of an upside-down copper pipe growing out of it.
“If I found an interesting pod or dried flower, I would throw it in there,” Viñas says, “so it was a place to store things I found in nature.”
Eliminate ad-hoc solutions
What you think of as a practical storage space can also be a place to enjoy, says Viñas: The garage, for example, is often where we dump garden tools and sports equipment, but it’s also the first room many people see when they come home.
In their Aspen, Colorado, home, Viñas organized the garage with red laminate storage shelving to focus on the family’s skis, poles and helmets, which are displayed on wall racks. When people drive up, “it’s like a beautiful jewelry box, and it’s totally unexpected,” she says.
Dog beds, cat scratchers, and other pet accessories are often an afterthought, often relegated to a corner and left to clutter, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
In their Wayne, Pennsylvania, home office, whose cats lived there and used it as their own, the founders of architecture and design firm Kaminski & Pugh searched Etsy for a wall-mounted cat bed.
“The owner was having trouble figuring out how to arrange the room in a way that would accommodate a large cat condo that she previously owned and work with her furniture,” says Alexis Pugh, who runs the company with her husband, Kevin Kaminski. “We found a wall-mounted version that got around this problem; it was sculptural when attached to the wall.”
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