My company SVH Design Interiors was recently approached by a client with a problem to
solve. They were a young family with a second child on the way and had bought a beautiful
1909 house in New Rochelle with very little closet space. The existing closets were dark and
basic and nonfunctional and the interiors of some of them had been used to install central air
ductwork, which rendered a few of them unusable. I presented them with different options at
various price points. Some were going to be simply retrofitted to gain more usable space and
the others were going to be custom built into the rooms. The additional issue was that since it
was during the pandemic there were some serious supply change issues, and they did not have
a long timeline.
For two of the bedrooms, I gutted the shelving and removed the existing clothes rails,
installed lighting, and redesigned the layout of the interior space to be more functional.
The large landing area halfway up the stairway begged for a built-in widow seat with storage
for bulky items, and to become an additional seating area perfect for bedtime stories.
The new nursery was a large space that was temporarily being used to store most of their
clothing on free standing racks. It was decided that we should custom build closets partially
along one wall. The guest room had an existing closet that was too shallow to properly hang
clothing, so I chose to demolish the small existing closet and custom build recessed closets
along the same wall.
For these two rooms it was important that the closets remain authentic to the style of the
house. They needed to have double hanging space, shelving for shoes as well as interior
drawers for maximum use of space, without overpowering the rooms and remain authentic to
the style of the house.
Lastly, the front entryway had a large radiator cover to the left serving as a shelf. The small
existing coat closet was completely unusable due to the ductwork inside, so there was nowhere
to hang coats or store shoes. For this area I walled over the existing closet and designed a
custom floor to ceiling, wall to wall closet with the help of California Closets. Here we chose a
modern grey grained wood for dramatic effect as it would be a focal point from the main living
area.
My clients were very happy with the results and now have storage space to spare!
Sarah Hough
SVH Design Interiors LLC
svhdesigninteriors.com
914 441-4942
