Garderober

Garderobe is Swedish for "clothes closet". (I think the term also applies informally to any sort of non-kitchen cabinet in a house.) Swedish homes and flats are typically pretty small, so they have to use their space very carefully. Efficient furniture is IKEA's stock in trade, so there's no surprise they have a very robust garderobe offering. There's an online planner on the UK and Swedish websites, although not the US one, likely because homes there usually have built-in closets. Rutger and I spent time on the planner last weekend when he was visiting, and there must be literally a million variations that can be put together.

Our house needs storage, of course, and space being at a premium, we want to make good use of what's available. The photos to the left show the entryways in both Stefan's own home and the X-House show home. Along the exterior of the bedroom wall, just past the front door, is a space about 1.75 meters long, about 80cm deep, and over 3m high. In both photos, plain vanilla IKEA cabinets have been stacked high, even above the bedroom doors, and then given a pine fascia to give a nice built-in look.

Sooz really wants the same in our house, in fact she doesn't want to put up anything there even temporarily. I can see her point; if we were to put up a bunch of white cabinets, we'd have our storage, ugly as it might be, and I'd move on to other matters.

Stefan gave us a lot of information on how he achieved this look, and we're going to make that an April project. For the moment, we'll put simple cabinets in the small house, because the aesthetics there aren't as important.