Mark, DD=dear daughter, DSIL=Dear son or sister in law, look at context clues to figure out which one.

It could be awkward when guests are present but I'm more worrying about living life day to day.

I couldn't live without our coat closet. If you can find a home with a solid wall and a deep enough hall near the entry, you could build an amazing closet using Ikea Pax hacks. And customize it your needs. Lots of videos on you Youtube.

We built in FL and I have coat closets at each garage entrance and near the front door. The main garage closet has actual coats that are rarely used. The secondary garage closet has life vests for the kayaks! The main guest closet has decor/stuff that I haven't found a home for yet!

I've noticed that many newer homes are missing coat closets and broom cupboards. My house didn't have one when I bought it, but I had a large built-in made for the dining room, which is very close to the entrance, and one side has a tall cupboard with a rail for coats and a plug for the charging the vacuum. I live in a temperate zone, so I didn't need space for bulky coats, just space for light jackets and sweaters.

Makes me think about lack of windows too. My old house is tiny in comparison but has 18 windows. Maybe lack of coat closets is a cost cutting mechanism like windows and walls seem to be.

I live in a 1914 Craftsman with only two closets, one in each bedroom. I use a vintage European pine armoire in the entryway as a coat closet.

We remodeled our kitchen when we bought our house almost 25 years ago and took out the entry closet to do it. Stupid, stupid.

Cape Cod style home built in 60's in New England. Small 18" wide coat closet by front door with a duct taking up half the space.

Added W/D closet and coat closet in kitchen when we remodeled

My first Toronto home (l) circa 1880 had no first floor closet. Must have been warmer then. [l is short for left]

........................

...And the attached garage didn’t have a door into the house.

That was a building code restriction through at least the 1950s.

Our previous home had no coat closet and no utility closet. I'd never lived in a house with no coat closet before. We discovered blueprints in the cabinet above the fridge -- it was basically our house with a few small changes on the side entry and garage -- and it had a coat closet in the front entry. The builder built that house in another neighborhood and then mostly repeated it - a little different front elevation and garage, but it had a coat closet in the front entry. Guess the crew just left it out. Closets were one of the things we liked about out current home - 3 off the front entry.

My folks’ winter home in AZ even had a front closet.

Our 1960 developer house has a nice front closet, and the floor is raised about 2” which is nice for keeping out dust bunnies that might waft in under the door.

We have a HUGE mud room with a HUGE wall of closet space for coats, then shelving underneath for shoes. It's custom, not tract housing. I'm in the Midwest. We have NO medicine cabinets. None of the walk-in closets have mirrors in them. I own older rental houses in the price range you mentioned, they have tiny little coat closets behind the front door. Would do us NO good, we own about 50 coats.

Our last house was in the midwest. It was a fully custom built home (we were the 5th owners though) and it was huge at over 5,400 sq ft and it originally had one, tiny coat closet by the garage entrance but it was too shallow to hang anything in. There was also a large, cavernous closet under a stair case off the foyer, but it was very awkward for a coat closet because one had to walk deeply into it to access the hanging rod. There was never a mud room or good place to remove muddy or snowy outerwear and it just seemed like such a waste of an opportunity. We ended up walling off the tiny closet by the garage entrance and joining it to the area on the other side of the wall to make a small walk in pantry for the kitchen, which was another thing the house didn’t have. We hung a long row of hooks in the laundry room, which was also near the garage entrance. The cavernous closet under the stairs did house some overflow coats, but it was mainly used for Christmas storage since there wasn’t good access to any of the attic space for those items. We ended up placing a very nice coat tree stand in our foyer for guests and I made our family use the hooks in the laundry room. It all worked, but it wasn’t ideal. When we bought our current home (which we hope is our forever home) on the coast of the PNW (ie, rainy and muddy half of the year and pine needles all year) I made sure to tell the architect that I had to have a good mud room connected to my laundry room. We didn’t opt for a proper coat closet IN the mud room, just space for a row of hooks since we are empty nesters now. We do have a coat closet nearby though. We do have a foot wash station inside the mud room and it has been every handy! I can also hang wet gear over the foot wash station. We have a teak bench in there that we can move around as needed, and cabinet drawers to house lots of shoes. I think all homes could benefit from a mud room and I wish they were common.

Sounds like a very foolish way to save $ in that climate. Our homes have decent size closets by the front and back door. In primary MN residence we have coats in both. At our lake place the back door closet is more of a broom closet - same in SC.

Storage is something all buyers check out. No closests =no sale more often than not.

Interesting. Our home was built in the nineties in Texas, and we have a nice coat closet near the front door. Our laundry room is also right inside at the garage entry, so anything particulary dirty or wet can be tossed in there. It is a tract house, but almost everything about the floor plan IMO has been great.

I never heard of such a thing, no coat closet. My house is small and in a temperate climate. Yes, there's a coat closet, actually sharing space with a linen closet. Coats at one end, sheets, towels, and blankets at the other. It's not adjacent to the front door, but it's just a few strides away.

In their existing $450k house semi tract house, they have the useless closet under the stairs and that is it on the main floor. You enter into the laundry room where we have put rows of hooks for coats.

In the house we are looking at tomorrow it has an angular staircase in a large foyer with no walls. I can't figure out where you would put one. This is not the first house we have looked at where this is the issue. None of these houses have been tract houses, they have all been custom builds within the lst 20 years.

useless closet under the stairs

That sounds like a Victorian design? NONE of my homes have a design where you could build something under the stairs.

If you do not have stairs going down, then you are left with that void under the stairs. If you have a staircase, you have one of these closets or voids whereever the staircase terminates.

We have stairs on top of stairs.....the stairs are an architectual feature. So...in THIS photo I'm standing in the great room, with 24' high ceilings....the white wall you see behind the stairs is part of the rest of the house...which has 10' high ceilings and a loft above that side of the house.

Here's another house I own. On the other side of the tan wall is a flight of stairs going down. In front of the stairs is just what you see....the 1st floor of the house. This house was built in 1959 & has mahogany wood trim. THIS house has NO coat closet. It's old "and" it's a tract house.

So what is under the carpeted space we see? A voided space? I have always seen a closet accessed from the opposite end of this stairway to make use of the space instead of just closing it in.

This house design is referred to as a side split level. In the middle of the 7 stairs is where the ceiling starts for the lower level. There IS a utility room on the lower level....that I outfitted with shelving and an open closet to make up for the lack of one on the first level.

My current house, built in 2001 and 4000+ sqft has only a single coat closet by the garage door. No coat closet by the front door for guests. It works ok for us, but I do find it a bit strange. Guests end up piling their coats on the bench in the entry (for people to remove shoes) or on the dining room chairs in the adjacent room.

My previous 1976 2500 sqft house had a coat closet by the front door and at the time nothing by the garage. I opted to take out the super 1970s wet bar and make it a storage closet including place to hang coats.

The family homes my father built in SoCal all had coat closets, something my parents seemed to think was essential in a home. I have never encountered one in SoCal after leaving home.

I have lived, and currently live in an area that had homes for summer vacations (rural [L.A. context], and beach) so maybe the need for cool weather clothing was not much of a consideration.

I also never heard of nor seen a mud room before visiting GardenWeb/Houzz. Service porches were common at one time here, but for washers, dryers, laundry sinks, and water heaters. Our 1921 beach cottage had a service porch pre remodel — but no insulation anywhere in the structure.

We have a coat closet but it is not near the front door. Our coat closet is near the kitchen and we also have a coat rack on the wall with a bench beneath across from the coat closet. We always leave from our kitchen. We keep our car keys, sunglasses and my purse near this area so we grab all that and a coat if needed and leave.

We have a historic home (4,800 sq ft ) in a snow country, it should have a coat closet by the front door, but there is none. On the 1st floor there are only two closets, one is in the library (DH’s office), the other is in the 2nd office (mine). We have a mudroom by the garage entrance, there are rows of hooks there for coats and hats.

I’m in a 1950s townhouse and the previous owner converted the coat closet into a powder room. So while a powder room on the main level is nice, not having a closet to stash coats and the vacuum cleaner is annoying.

Thinking more about this I realized the home I grew up in in MN didn't have any coat closets and the bedroom closets were small. I have no recollection of where we kept our coats and winter gear. When you came in from the attached garage you came through an unheated back porch of sorts into a pretty large utility/laundry room but neither of those had any place to hang coats. I do remember taking my snowy outerwear off in the utility room when I came in from playing outside but where it went there I don't know. We did have a broom closet in the kitchen though - big enough only for brooms and a canister vacuum. When we had visitors the coats went on a bed in one of the bedrooms.

I’m just here to see how many piano jokes Mark can make.

Cross posting to Building a Home, I was hoping I would get some draftsman/architect snide comments. I do think that many times the MEN doing the floor plans don't understand the benefit of a good closet or closets.

Unfortunately, I got rid of the console piano several years ago as it did not hold very many coats.

When we built I made sure to have a coat closet for guests. But when my DH family would come over they'd stack their coats on the banister and pile the shoes in the entryway which was a little maddening since the space is not large. Eventually I'd leave the coat closet door open and they mostly get put in there. Reading this made me realize not one of them has a coat closet, even in the 6000+ size home, so that must be the reasoning.

A few of them do have upright pianos. Maybe an upgrade is in order.

This house sounds huge so get some wardrobes for coats.

My brother lives in an old home with no closets. He got a great wood wardrobe that he keeps next to the front door it is beautiful. If your home is more modern, get a sleek wardrobe.

I grew up in a 1920s house in a city with four seasons, need for lots of coats, and small or no closets. Everyone I knew hung coats on the wall to the basement. Adult coats hung higher, kid coats hung lower. It's just they way it was in every household.

We have generous coat closets at the front door and in the hallway to the garage. In December we had party at our house, with 9 guests (all but 2 of them at least 63). Even though I had stocked the front closet with hangers, I noticed all the coats ended up on the bed in the guest room (we don't have a piano).

We have friends who have a small kitchen. They added a large mud room off the garage. Since virtually everyone who visits them comes through the garage to get in the house, they converted the front door closet to a pantry/broom closet (it's pretty close to the kitchen).

In addition to bedroom closets and a pantry, every house needs:

- A coat closet, preferably by the back door for the family.

- A linen closet

- A broom closet

If you don't have these things, you could add a cabinet.

Kendrah, DH grew up in a late 1940s-1950 post-war house with no guest closet. 7 kids, winter weather, skates and hockey sticks, and everything was in the back vestibule and the the steps leading down, but not the half-flight steps leading up to main floor, because that was visible and it was an attempt to keep things at bay.

Our 1960 house has what clearly was a broom closet in th kitchen, thank goodness someone turned it into a pantry, albeit a small one. We did the same in our previous 1960 house. Now our vacuum lives upstairs (where the carpeting is), a broom behind the refrigeratory, mops on a narrow bit of wall in the little laundry room. This house was built by a developer, so was our last one, which explains everything.

The custom homes I’ve lived in made much more sense.

Mark, since pianos are so hard to resell these days, that should be a new pitch: coat-holding capacity.

Oh man... we had a grand piano (had, because it now belongs to our oldest daughter) and nobody even DARED to set anything on that piano except music on the music stand. At Christmas, there was one particular decoration that went on a runner on top of the piano, but that was it. I just can’t fathom people draping crap over a beautiful piano.

I had one house built for me, and requests #1 and #2 were defined entry ways from both the front door and the garage, with large closets and plenty of room to move around in each location. It's not a large house, roughly 2300 square feet - and yet I really value those nice entries and would prioritize space in the same way again.

I messed up many other requests, but I got those 2 right anyway.

I love to look at floor plans and I notice this too. I don't understand it. We have 2 coat closets in our foyer. One on either side of the front door. One is for our family and the other for hanging guest's coats.

I now realize that the very small house I grew up in had no coat closet. Like someone above said, I too have no memory of what we did with our coats. Or snow boots. Hmmm.

The other thing that bugs me about floor plans for new houses is when the powder room is right off the kitchen. Not a good idea! I get it in older homes where powder rooms were often added later and you did what you could with what you had to work with. But in a newly built home? Makes no sense to me.

It's just so ironic that in these huge 4,000+ square foot homes they have humongous walk-in closets in bedrooms but no coat closets on the first floor??? And yes, older homes usually don't have much in the way of closets probably because people didn't have as many clothes back in the day. My old 1920s Colonial revival has small closets in the bedrooms and a nice coat closet in the foyer. We've since expanded our master bedroom closet and added a WIC in the back hallway. Both have our coats but a lot of room for guests' coats as well.

I’ll be an outlyer here. We built a custom home in ski country where some type of coat is needed almost year round (cool summer evenings) and yet we told our architect we didn’t want coat closets. Why? First, I have seen way too many ’coat” closets that may contain a few old coats, but are filled with lots of other things — stuff (games, sporting equipment, vacuums, etc. ) that doesn’t have another place to live as well as little used or long forgotten coats and are too full to handle guest coats as well. Well, we designed more convenient places for the stuff. Second, because we need a coat almost every time we leave the house, I want to be able to grab it as effortlessly as possible and and be able to put it up just as easily. For that reason, coat hooks work best. This is what we did — a coat rack in the foyer (only used by guests) and another with a bench in the entry hall across from the vestibule entry from the garage used by family and sometimes guests.

Other, less used, coats have a designated place in the master closet. Or really less used coats like my black dress cashmere “funeral‘ coat live full time in my seasonal closet upstairs as does my mink that I would never dare to wear here.

mojomom, I love your old ski coat rack! I have several pairs of old skis (but not nearly as old as yours!) that I'm hanging on to in case I think of something clever to do with them. This might just be the thing!

Maybe the lack of coat closet is part of Greta's global warming thing??

For me, I design houses with coat closets.

I believe you do Mark because you are an architect in a colder climate.

When we toured the house, there were several things that make it a no go. The kids did come up with the idea to knock a door from the garage into the 5th bed/office to make it a mudroom. That would have worked except the garage was very shallow also. Would have only had 2 foot extra after minivan was pulled to the front wall.

Instead of fixing something that does not work, create something that does work.

(unfortunately economics is usually a factor)

I can't think of a single home that I have been in that doesn't have a coat closet near the main entry. Our first home was a bi-level (aka raised ranch) and while it didn't have a closet in the foyer it had one near the bottom of the stairs and another one near the top.

We're in an over 55 home that is now 23 years old, no basement but great closets. The foyer has a regular closet plus another closet that is under the stairs. It's parallel to the staircase and at the back also goes underneath the steps.

I had a client that was from southern California. The first time we met at their newly acquired cottage on the northern shore of Lake Michigan I showed up in a polo shirt and shorts, they showed up in down parkas. There is always a use and a good idea for a coat closet near entries into a home even if it is a place to put raincoats or a vacuum cleaner or the dog's leash.