When designing your house, “unless you are a minimalist tidy freak”, there are bits, pieces, and items that all need a home. Let’s be practical laundry is untidy! Not only that, for the smooth running of a house there are functions that just need to be accommodated within the envelope of the home. So how do you find space for laundry? Planning!

One of the biggest responses I received on Twitter for a tweet recently was one of a wall-mounted drying rack for clothes. Who knew that this one feature would generate such a long discussion? I have recently designed and installed this item into a project where the client really didn’t like to use a tumble dryer, using a washing line in the garden wasn’t practicable – so I researched on the internet and found a number of options.

• A homemade wooden rack – which would have worked, but the difficulty is finding someone to make it for you, and being bespoke would have been prohibitively expensive for a practical item such as this. But this one from pulleymaid.com is rather good and the price is brilliant.
• That stalwart of the ‘useful item you didn’t know you needed’  Ikea do some great wall-mounted racks like the Grundtal Drying Rack – wall mounted stainless steel for only £20.00
• For something a bit more substantial and it can easily be moved to hang outside the house as well as in,  Julu Home has developed this rather smart wooden rack system.
• In a recently completed laundry room, squeezed into the attic slope of an attic extension. Not the best of headroom, but for someone of my height 5’5” it’s fine. I can walk beneath the line which takes two loads of washing I used one of these wall-mounted folding compact washing lines from The Clothes Airer Company.  It gives you 20 mtrs of drying line.

In a busy household where you don’t want your drying clothes to be sprinkled around the house drying on radiators and folding racks – a well designed small space can save you this issue.  You don’t have to have a special room for laundry, just some thought put into where it’s all going to go – and shock horror gasp, the washing machine doesn’t have to go in the kitchen!   Not something that is often considered important by many interior planners, but to me a well-designed room for laundry is a thing of beauty!

 

 

 

 

 

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