Work it out by counting what you own, not by copying a layout. Most people need more hanging space and fewer drawers than they specify, because hanging is what a wardrobe is uniquely good at and drawers are the thing that looks impressive in a showroom. The reliable method is to sort your clothes into four groups before the design appointment: things that hang long, things that hang short, things that fold, and things that need a shelf. The numbers in each group decide the layout.
This guide takes you through that method, explains the terms your designer will use, and covers the decisions that are difficult to reverse once the wardrobe is built.
Why layout matters more than size
A wardrobe that is the wrong size is obvious. A wardrobe with the wrong internal layout is not, and it is far more common. It looks fine, it fits the wall, and every day for the next fifteen years you do one small awkward thing because the shelf is in the wrong place.
The internals are also the largest variable in what a wardrobe costs, which means getting the layout right is where the money goes furthest in both directions. Specify drawers you do not need and you pay for storage you will fill with things that do not belong in a bedroom. Specify too few hanging metres and you end up with a rail so crowded that clothes crease and you stop being able to see what you own.
How do you work out what you need?
Empty the current wardrobe, or at least look at it honestly, and sort into four groups.
Group one: long hanging. Full length dresses, long coats, robes, suit bags. Anything that needs the full drop of a rail.
Group two: short hanging. Shirts, blouses, jackets, folded trousers over a hanger bar, skirts. This is the largest group in most households by a wide margin.
Group three: folded. Knitwear, t-shirts, underwear, socks, sleepwear, denim. These can live in drawers or on shelves, and which one is a genuine choice rather than a rule.
Group four: everything else. Shoes, bags, hats, sporting equipment, luggage, linen, the box of things that has no home.
Count each group, roughly. You do not need an exact figure. You need to know whether group one is four items or forty, because that single number changes the layout more than anything else you will tell a designer.
How much hanging space do you actually need?
Hanging space is measured in linear metres of rail. To estimate what you need, work from the thickness of what is hanging.
Shirts and blouses on hangers occupy roughly the thickness of the garment plus the hanger, and they compress. Jackets, coats and anything structured take noticeably more, and they should not be compressed, because that is how a shoulder gets a crease that does not come out.
A practical approach: measure the rail in your current wardrobe, note how full it is, and decide whether the new wardrobe should hold the same, more, or less. If your current rail is packed to the point where you have to force a hanger in, you need more than you have, and the sensible target is a rail that is comfortably full rather than one you can just close.
The other thing worth knowing is that hanging space is not a fixed proportion of a wardrobe. In a section given over to short hanging, you can run two rails one above the other and double the capacity of that section. That is the single most effective way to increase hanging capacity without increasing the size of the wardrobe.
What is the difference between short hang and long hang?
Short hang is a section with the rail set at a height that suits shirts, jackets, skirts and folded trousers, leaving usable space below for shelves, drawers or shoes.
Long hang is a section with the rail set high enough for full length garments, with the space below left clear.
Double hang is two short hang rails stacked in one section, one above the other.
The design decision is how many sections go to each. A common workable arrangement in a family wardrobe is one long hang section, one or two double hang sections, and the remaining sections given to a mix of drawers and shelving. But that is a starting point, not a rule. A household with a lot of formal or occasion wear needs more long hang. A household that lives in shirts and jeans needs almost none.
The mistake to avoid is specifying long hang across most of the wardrobe out of caution. Long hang sections have dead space below them. If you have six long garments, you need one long hang section, not three.
How many drawers do you need?
Fewer than most people specify.
Drawers are useful for a specific job: small folded items that would fall over in a stack. Underwear, socks, swimwear, small accessories. They are also good for anything you want out of sight.
Where drawers stop earning their keep is bulk folded storage. A stack of jumpers in a deep drawer becomes a stack you dig through, and the item you want is at the bottom. The same jumpers on an open shelf behind a closed door are visible, accessible and cost less to build.
A reasonable starting point for one person is a small bank of drawers for the things that genuinely need containing, and shelving for the rest. Add drawers beyond that when you can name what goes in each one.
The other consideration is height. Drawers work best in the lower half of a wardrobe, where you can see into them from above. A drawer above shoulder height is a drawer you reach into blind.
What belongs on a shelf rather than in a drawer?
Shelves suit anything you want to see, anything bulky, and anything stored in a stack where the whole stack is broadly interchangeable.
• Knitwear and sweatshirts, where you want to see the colour before you pull it out
• Denim and casual trousers, folded
• Handbags, standing upright
• Boxed or bagged items
• Linen, in a section given over to it
• Anything seasonal, in the upper compartment
Shelves are also more adaptable. A shelf can be moved, or something else can be stood on it. A drawer is a drawer for the life of the wardrobe.
Shelf spacing matters more than shelf count. Shelves set too far apart create stacks that topple. Shelves set too close create shelves that only take two shirts. Ask for the spacing to be set to what you are actually putting on each one, and ask whether any of the shelves are adjustable.
How deep does a wardrobe need to be?
Deep enough that a garment on a hanger sits square to the wall without touching the door.
That is set by the hanger, not by the clothes. A standard coat hanger is a little under half a metre across the shoulders, so a wardrobe carcase needs meaningful clearance beyond that for the garment, plus room for the door to close in front of it. That is why built-in wardrobes settle around a common depth range rather than varying freely.
The reason to care is that shallow wardrobes are a real trap in narrow rooms. If a wardrobe is made shallower to keep a walkway usable, the hanging sections stop working properly, and the fix is to either turn the hanging rail so garments face sideways, which changes the whole layout, or to accept that coats will brush the door.
Where a room genuinely cannot take a standard depth, that is a design conversation to have at the measure and quote, not a compromise to discover afterwards.
Where do shoes go?
Decide this before the design, because shoes are the item most often left out and then retrofitted badly.
Options, in rough order of how much wardrobe space they consume:
• Under a short hang section, on angled or flat shelves. Efficient, because it uses space that is otherwise dead.
• In the base of the wardrobe, on a dedicated shelf. Simple and accessible.
• On a pull-out rack. Good for a large collection, and an added cost.
• Not in the wardrobe at all. A hall or entry solution keeps outdoor shoes out of the bedroom, which suits some households and not others.
The question to answer honestly is how many pairs, and how many of those are worn weekly rather than kept. Shoe storage sized for a collection you no longer wear is space taken from clothes you wear daily.
What if two people are sharing one wardrobe?
Divide by function before you divide by person.
The instinct is to split the wardrobe down the middle and give each person half. That works if both people have similar wardrobes. It works poorly if one person has thirty dresses and the other has twelve shirts and a suit, because you end up with a crowded half and a half with an empty long hang section.
A better approach is to allocate by what is being stored. One long hang section serving whoever needs it. Double hang sections split according to how much short hanging each person has. Drawers divided between the two. Shelving shared.
The one thing worth genuinely splitting is drawers, because drawers are the storage people are most territorial about, and there is no cost to nominating which bank belongs to whom.
Is an overhead compartment worth it?
Usually, if the ceiling allows and the house is short on storage elsewhere.
An overhead compartment is the space above the main wardrobe, closed off with its own doors, running to the ceiling. It takes the things you need a few times a year: luggage, spare bedding, seasonal clothing, the fan in winter and the heater in summer.
Two things determine whether it is worth doing. The first is ceiling height. If the ceiling is low, the compartment may be too shallow to hold anything substantial. The second is whether you have a garage, a shed or a linen press. In a Sydney apartment with none of those, the overhead compartment is often the most useful part of the wardrobe.
If you do include one, think about how you will reach it. Anything above head height needs a step, and that is fine as long as the things stored there are things you get out twice a year rather than twice a week.
How do you plan a wardrobe for a child whose needs will change?
By building for the room rather than for the child’s current height.
A wardrobe in a child’s room has to work through several stages. A toddler’s clothes are small and mostly folded, and almost nothing needs long hanging. A primary school child needs a low rail they can reach, and somewhere for school bags and sports gear. A teenager needs an adult wardrobe with more hanging than you expect and somewhere to put things out of sight.
The way to handle that without rebuilding twice is adjustability. Ask for adjustable shelving rather than fixed. Ask whether a rail can be repositioned. Build the carcase at full height with the internals set for now, so the internals can move as the child grows and the joinery does not have to.
The other useful move is to put a low rail in one section for a young child, positioned so it can later be removed or raised, rather than designing the whole wardrobe around a height that will be wrong in four years.
Do you need lighting inside the wardrobe?
It depends on where the wardrobe is and how the room is lit.
A wardrobe on the wall opposite a window in a bright room usually does not need it. A wardrobe in a recess, in a room with a single central ceiling light, or behind sliding doors that block most of the ambient light frequently does, because you stand between the light and the wardrobe and cast a shadow into it.
The options are a strip along the underside of a shelf or the top of the opening, or sensor-operated lights that come on when a door opens. Both are decided at design, because both need power run to the joinery before it is installed. Adding lighting to a finished wardrobe means either surface-mounted battery units or cutting into completed cabinetry.
If you are unsure, the test is simple: stand where you would stand to use the wardrobe, at the time of day you usually get dressed, and see whether you can distinguish navy from black.
A method you can work through before your appointment
1. Sort your clothes into the four groups above and get a rough count of each.
2. Measure the rail in your current wardrobe and decide whether you need more, less or the same.
3. Count long garments. That number sets your long hang sections.
4. Name what goes in each drawer you want. If you cannot name it, remove the drawer.
5. Decide where shoes live.
6. Decide whether anything bulky needs a home: luggage, sporting gear, linen.
7. Note who is sharing the wardrobe and what they each store.
8. Photograph the room, including the ceiling, the skirting and any power points or switches on the wardrobe wall.
Take that to the appointment. A designer can work from a wall measurement alone, but the design will be generic. A designer working from an inventory produces a wardrobe that fits what you own.
Layout mistakes worth avoiding
Too much long hang. Dead space under every one of those sections.
Drawers above shoulder height. You cannot see into them.
Fixed shelves set at showroom spacing. They will not match what you own.
A single very wide hanging section. Rails sag over long spans without support, and a wide section is harder to keep organised than two narrower ones.
Designing for the clothes you plan to buy. Design for the clothes you have, and leave a section flexible.
Forgetting the things that are not clothes. The vacuum, the suitcase, the ironing board and the spare doona all live somewhere. If the wardrobe does not take them, the wardrobe has not solved the storage problem.
The next step
The fastest way to get this right is to have someone measure the room and work through the inventory with you. Impressive Wardrobes offers a free measure and quote, where a designer looks at the space and the contents together and produces a layout for what you actually store.
Book your free measure and quote, or call (02) 9796 1022. The showroom at 54 Canterbury Rd, Bankstown has internal fit-outs on display, which is a useful way to see rail heights, shelf spacing and drawer sizes at full scale before you decide.
