Making Laundry Sexy Again

How Laundry Rooms soothe and restore

It was the first room to the right just inside the front door. She walked in and twirled around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Visions of fitted sheets and t-shirts stacked like flattened origami danced in her head as she gazed at the folding table, while the side by side stainless Bosch gleamed in reflected light of the halogens above.

“You had me at the laundry room,” she told me later. 

It was the first time I realized how emotional people can get about laundry. Maybe I was behind the curve because San Francisco’s smaller homes generally don’t allow for the luxury of laundry rooms. Instead, we settle for a closet in the hall that can take a stacked unit or space among the storage shelves by the back door of the kitchen.  Lately, however, urban remodeling projects and new construction is honoring this special need for order and control and trying to address it with rooms, or at least a bit of extra space to sort and fold them. 

The following links are designed to soothe and inspire those who enjoy the Zen of a good wash and fold experience.

This first link from Houzz shows off design schemes bathed in grays, blues and greens. Depending on the shade, you will either feel neat and nautical, or utterly engaged in the Zen of it all.

These next two links offer more practical advice and images for small laundry spaces and rooms. My favorite ideas are the orange barn doors hiding the laundry “closet” in House Beautiful Small Laundry Room Ideas, and the drawer hiding the pull-out ironing board from a post with small space laundry ideas from MorningChores.com.

Finally, those of you who understand the transcendent power of  proper folding might enjoy watching the famed Marie Kondo demonstrating the folding technique that took the country by storm a few years ago with the advent of her best selling book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”