Closet is more than place to stash clothes

It certainly wasn't what Virginia Woolf had in mind.

When the writer coined the famous phrase, "A room of one's own," in a lecture at Cambridge in 1928, she was addressing a woman's need for space and opportunity if her intellectual life was to flourish.

Well, Ginny, we got the room, all right — though it's usually just a cubical.

Today we need a new type of room of our own. A place for quiet reflection and self-actualization before we log on to a hyper-connected world.

Hello, closet!

A closet is a place to hide secrets, savor flimsy, lovely things or unhook a work-a-day uniform.

It's a sacred space.

Hello Campos went one better. When she built her Miami house several years ago, she turned her closet into a fortress.

Personalize the space


To make your closet more personal, try some touches that have worked for others:

• Hang photos.

• Keep perfumes there so the space smells like you.

• Display items at the front of your closet because you love them, not necessarily because you wear them.

• Paint the interior a whimsical color.

• Keep your under-garments and pj's in your closet so you can get fully dressed inside.

Miami Herald

"It's a hurricane shelter," said Campos, perched on the moving ladder she uses to reach the second story of her walk-in closet — one of two, actually. "It's all concrete."

The upper tier is where she keeps formal gowns and luggage. It's also where she stores furs, cooled by an air-conditioning vent a few inches away.

Down below are the underthings she keeps tucked into their own Ziploc bags so she can grab them and go for a jaunt to St. Tropez.

"I'm very proud of my closet because I feel happy when I look for things," Campos said.

As it turns out, bad weather has never caused her to hunker down among her beloved boots and bags. But sometimes she takes shelter there anyway.

"If it's a day when I'm very up, I just go," said Campos. "But if I'm a little blue, hours and hours. I try things on, I put them here," she said, gesturing to a shelf. "I try other things ... "

Closet turn boudoir

The closet off Saskia Galliano-Touret's bedroom can't honestly be called a closet.

Really it's a boudoir, a place meant for primping, bathing and basking in the cherry-hued light that stained glass windows throw across the marble floor.

But it wasn't for glory that Touret built the space. It was for intimacy.

"It's supposed to be a nice, cozy, little place," said Touret. "My husband has his office. My office is my bathroom. It's where I keep my sanity."

Simply entering the space is itself a reprieve, said Touret, a former manager at L'Oreal.

"It's a ritual," she said. "You go in and you're going to spend some time. I could go in and get dressed and not even go out."

Even renters can do it

Turning a closet into a sanctuary doesn't require running water or skilled labor.

"I always rent," said Catalina Rojas. "So I pick up what's already there and adopt it."

Rojas thinks her fondness for the space comes from tender memories of her grandmother's armoire in Chile. "It was like the treasure place in her bedroom. You could hide in there. It was small, but she had things like chocolates in there," she said.

Through the years, she has used her closets as work spaces, housing her desk and computer, and stationery tools. At one time she found it to be the perfect, quiet place for her napping infant.

These days, Rojas has a closet as big as a queen-size bed, where she has pictures and all her necklaces on display. "I love to hang out in it."

Closets lend themselves to intimate personalization that other areas of the home might not, said Rosalyn Cherry, a professional organizer for 11 years in New York City.

Of course, closet organizers hate clutter. They want you to pitch anything you can't wear right now or don't want to. For Rojas, though, it's exactly the things that aren't practical that make her closet feel so special.

"I keep in there the things, if I ever had to leave, the things I would take with me. Photos when I was little. My earrings. Hidden things," she said.

"I also have all my bags in there, everything that I wear, of course."

That's the other thing about closets. They hold your clothes.