A Place for Everything

Trend-watcher J. Walker Smith, president of the Yankelovich Group, says Americans suffer from something he's dubbed the "claustrophobia of abundance." This battle with too much stuff, to echo comedian George Carlin, has led to a mini-industry of organizational outlets (think The Container Store), television shows (HGTV's "Mission: Organization" and TLC's "Clean Sweep"), and the return of the mudroom, a space that hearkens back to a time when horse-drawn plows made mud-covered farmers a fact of daily life.

Of course, today's mudrooms - most often found at the back of a house with an outside entry and easy access to both the laundry room and kitchen - have relatively little connection to mud, unless you count what children and dogs track in. More often than not, a mudroom serves as a home's organizational command center. Smart builders and designers are positioning it as the perfect place to start organizing all that stuff, right where it enters the house.

"Almost every house we're doing now has a mudroom with built-in cubbies," says Watertown, Mass., architect David Haijian. "There's so much going on that people are trying to be as organized as they can. A mudroom helps to do that, especially with kids." Besides cubbies or some sort of vertical storage system, Haijian's other must-have components include:

• coat hooks
• easy-to-clean floors (the architect is big on linoleum these days)
• a place for people to sit while shedding shoes
• lots of light (Haijian prefers recessed halogen spots)
• an electrical outlet that's convenient for recharging cell phones and laptops

East Hampton, N.Y., architect Erica Broberg says harried moms are the clients most likely to want a mudroom. "A busy mom has three requests: A nice bathtub, a pantry and a mudroom," says Broberg. "So many mothers have said to me, 'I'm tired of stepping over tennis racquets and book bags and surfboards that have been dumped at the front door!'" In order to resolve that tendency toward dumping, the architect usually sets up a system where each member of the family, including parents, has his or her own vertical stand of cubbies with hooks and shelves.

But there's another member of the family who also has a role in the mudroom: Broberg put a handsome soapstone sink in one mudroom for a client who wanted to be able to rinse off her muddy dog. Some mudroom layouts even include a floor drain and a hand-held shower so larger dogs can be hosed down without having to be hoisted into a sink.

A pet holds center stage in one Las Vegas mudroom, which has all the expected bells and whistles - vertical cubbies, a durable floor, a spot for the mail, a blackboard. Designed by Bassenian/Lagoni, an architectural firm in Newport Beach, Calif., and fitted out by designers from Color Design Art in Thousand Oaks, Calif., this mudroom features an oval-shaped space carved out of the plaster wall that's just the right size for the family dog to curl up and take a quick snooze.