Minimum and recommended measures
At MMPS, Carlow, we are specialised in home design, in how to take advantage of every square meter of the house to obtain an attractive and, above all, functional design. To optimise a design it is important to know in detail the minimum and recommended measurements for each room in the house.
The design of a perfect wardrobe is the work of the carpenter who manufactures and assembles it. But we want you to participate in this process. We want you to see from the beginning how it will look and that it meets your expectations.
Width
Before we can organise the interior storage space of the closet, we need to know how big it can be. With the MMPS joiner, we can make custom cabinets of almost any width, but we are going to review some recommendations.
- If the closet is going to have folding doors, it is not recommended that it be less than 50 cm wide.
- If sliding doors are used, we must not go below 150 cm wide.
- In cupboards without doors we can go down to a width of 30 cm.
- The recommended minimum closet width per person is at least 1 meter.
Depth
When we want to know what kind of closet we are going to fit in, the first thing we are going to take into account is the background we have.
- 65 or more cm deep – Wardrobe with sliding doors for all uses.
- 60 cm deep – Wardrobe with folding doors for all uses. It is the most used measure.
- 35 to 50 cm deep – Wardrobe with folding doors for accessories or folded clothes.
- 25 to 35 cm deep – Wardrobe without doors for accessories or shoes.
Height
Here there is no doubt, the closet to the top whenever possible. If we want to have an organised house, it is important to find a space to store everything, not just clothes. For this reason, it is highly recommended to bring the cabinets up to the height of the ceiling, to take advantage of every last centimetre. The cabinets almost always have an upper area for a mezzanine or trunk starting at approximately 180-190 cm from the floor. At this point it is no longer comfortable to constantly access our clothes, so we leave shelves free to store bedding, suitcases and other household items.
The cabinets that are sold to us already made are usually between 200 and 240 cm in total height. Between 230 and 240 cm we could consider it a standard height. These cabinets will leave us some free lofts of about 40-50 cm, which have a very good use. If your house has much more height available, you may have to resort to dividing the boot space into several heights or placing removable fittings, which go down easily to give us greater accessibility to high areas.
Doors
Let’s go over some of the most important points about cabinet doors.
- Hinged doors take up less space, so they allow us to have cabinets in shallower openings.
- Sliding doors need guides that occupy about 8-9 cm, bottom space that we lose in our closet. If 3 guides are placed to have 3 independent doors, we are already lost 13-14 cm.
- It is recommended that folding doors have a width close to 50 cm. If they are made wider, there is a risk of sagging and they take up a lot of space when opening.
- Sliding doors are not recommended to be less than 75 cm wide and, if possible, 1 meter. If the door is very slim (little width and a lot of height) it can derail.
- The folding doors allow us to open the closet completely, while with the sliding ones there will always be a closed part.
- Hinged doors require more free space in front to be able to open them comfortably. In the case of placing a wardrobe next to the bed, it is advisable to use sliding doors so as not to interfere with the bed or the nightstands.
- We can also choose to make a closet or dressing room without doors, something that we see more and more regularly. They require less depth, but involve more organisation and cleaning work.
Internal Organisation
A good interior organisation of our closet implies, first of all, knowing how much our clothes occupy. We can take a meter and measure our folded shirts or blouses, our hanging pants and our longest coat or dress to get exact measurements, but it is easier to mark wide margins for each type of garment. Depending on what the clothes occupy, we mark the size of the shelves, drawers or the height of the bars.
For hanging clothes, 3 size bands are usually handled:
- Long clothing: coats, suits and dresses – They occupy between 100 and 160 cm. It is recommended to leave a hole with a free height of 180 cm.
- Average clothing: shirts, pants, skirts and jackets – They occupy between 80 and 110 cm. The most common is to leave a height of 110 cm for this type of clothing.
- Short clothing: folded or short pants, blouses, T-shirts and short skirts – They occupy between 30 and 70 cm. The space for these clothes is about 80-90 cm high and it is common to use two bars in the same module to make better use of the height of the closet.
It is important that we always place the bars at a height that is comfortable for us to remove and put hangers. The maximum height for a bar to be comfortable is 200 cm above the ground and the minimum is 80 cm.
Folded clothes are much more homogeneous than hanging ones, since we can always fold them the same way. Usually, a correctly folded garment occupies 30cm wide by 35-40cm deep. As for the height, we must take into account that a sweater or jumper occupies twice as much as a T-shirt, shirt or blouse. For comfort, accessibility and to avoid wrinkles, it is recommended to stack up to 3 jumpers and up to 5 T-shirts. Given this, a shelf must be a minimum of 30 cm wide (if it is for a single garment) by 40 cm deep, and a height of between 25 and 30 cm.
Finally, we have the drawers and the shoe cabinets. It is very comfortable and accessible to have clothes hung on bars or placed on shelves (removable or fixed), but in the lower parts of the closet it can be uncomfortable to use these systems and, above all, they do not allow us to easily see our clothes. For this reason, in the lower areas of the wardrobe, from the floor to 55-80 cm from the floor, drawers and/or shoe cabinets are usually placed, usually 3 or 4. There are very thin drawers, only 10 cm high , for accessories, but the usual thing is that they are between 20 and 30 cm high. For a better use of the drawers, it is highly recommended to make them with divisions or interior compartments.
If you like to organize spaces and you are a very tidy person, it is very possible that you will like and enjoy designing your own closets. For those who are not so good at order, it is best to ask our carpenters for advice.