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It wasn’t the lion, the witch, and the walk in closet… 😂😂😂😂❤

As someone from Germany where walk-in and built-in closets are not a thing this is fascinating. We just have wardrobes and dressers...

My grandfather is in his 90s and still has his mother's bedroom set complete with a wash stand. She was fancy pants and had one with a mirror attached. He even still uses the original pitcher and wash basin to wash his face every night before bed. The matching "hope chest", as he calls it, is still in use too. It houses a bunch of family heirlooms.

I immediately paused this video to go shout to my husband that my elaborate laundry habits of having several hooks, baskets, and laundry chairs for things that "aren't dirty ENOUGH yet" are historically accurate 😅

As an older person, most people really did not have as much clothing as now. It was better quality. Separates were big. We did switch summer for winter, and back. We used trunks and mothballs. When we were young we could fit both mine and my husband's clothing into one closet with space to spare.

06:26 all i'm hearing is that my chairdrobe is just historically accurate

As someone who is studying architecture right now this was actually really helpful. We literally do not talk about closets and I can see how it’s an oversight!

As a Brit, living in a 1950's home, with NOT ONE built in cupboard, of any kind (other than kitchen cabinets, your home gives me closet envy.  :D

In my part of Europe built-in closets are not a thing. My Canadian mum went to war with my dad to have some built when they renovated their house instead of just putting wardrobes along the walls. She didn’t have to fight very hard though, he was easily convinced. Good luck with your closets. As someone who lives in one room but has crafting hobbies,  I find that space has become my most needed resource so… May there forever be space in your closets when you need it.

I grew up in a Victorian mansion (it had a ballroom on the 3rd floor) and it had magnificent closets. My parent's room had a small dressing room that made a very cool walk in closet and my room's closet was two rods deep. Same with my sister's room's closet... the first owner/builder must have had a closet thing. Was their a ghost in my closet? Yes. Did it bother my clothing? Nope!

I recall a trip my Girl Scout troop made to Seneca Falls, NY back around 1996 or 97. We got to tour Elizabeth Cady Stanton's house. There was a bedroom on the second floor with a teeny, tiny "closet" in it- just as wide as the door frame. And in place of a back wall, it had a second door. To the outside. Door to the outside on the second floor in the back of a closet. The woman who was giving us the tour told us that it was a work-around for property taxes. She said that at the time the house was built, property taxes on houses (in upstate New York, at least) were based on how many rooms were in a house, and a room was defined as at least 3 walls, a door, and large enough for a grown man to step inside and turn around. Building the closet that way (2 walls and 2 doors) made it count as a hallway, which did not count as a room for tax purposes. I've not personally researched the topic, but there are a fair number of second-floor doors to nowhere in houses from that era in that part of New York!

It is facinating what you don't know that you don't know. I'm fairly fluent in english but not a native speaker and in my native language both wardrobe and closet translate into the same word. It never crossed my mind that in english they are different things. If anyone had asked me the difference between wardrobe and closet before I saw this I would probably have said that wardrobe was British english and closet was American english.
Today I learned something new.

* Edit removed doubble space

My grandmother lived in an enormous 10 room farm house, the old half of which was built in the 1850s and the new half in the 1890s.  There were exactly 2.5 closets.  The pantry under the main stairs, the crawlspace under the old stairs (reportedly just big enough to hide a still.  We never used it because it never stopped smelling like the still, even nearly a century later), and the upstairs closet (originally used exclusively for potatoes, but we never used it.  Because it never stopped smelling like potatoes.)  

Having everything in drawers, cupboards, and chests, or on shelves and hanging racks, was never really a problem.  But her friends did often comment on the lack of closets!

Early in our marriage, about 40 years ago, my hubs and i were looking at a house in a quaint neighborhood for about 65k. Original hardwoods, 9 foot ceilings, walking distance to the grocery, big windows, great schools. Gorgeous! No closets. Killed it for him. That house just sold for nearly 1 million. 😢

Another reason for the lack of closets was that in many places in the US, property tax was/is based on the number of bedrooms. A bedroom is defined as a room with a closet. No closet, no bedroom, lower tax bill. Even if someone slept in the room.

As a person from Europe, this is super fascinating, since we were always using and continue to use wardrobes and dressers. Walk-in closets startong to be interesting in new-builts, but not much and mostly only at houses, not appartments 🤷‍♀️ so fascinating to see other side of this 😊

I toured a house built in the late 1800s in Utah. The guide said none of the rooms had closets because there was a tax based on the number of closets 😂

Since I've had a lot of international audience comment about how closets are a luxury in their area- It's actually the opposite here for a lot of reasons! While, yes, technically you pay for the space that a closet takes up, it can still be much cheaper than the furniture alternative. Most Americans don't have access to inexpensive furniture that can survive more than a few years without falling apart- and even that is shockingly expensive. I buy antiques when I can, but those aren't always cheaper (we don't have as much, so it's "rare"). More so, we move long distances a lot. For jobs, family, or even because rent goes up all the time. I've lived in 11 different places and that's not unusual. Most of these moves are 1-2000km apart (my last move was over 3000km). And the moving is VERY expensive. To move a two bedroom home across a few states can often be $10,000 or more. It's much cheaper to pay a little extra for closet space and fill it with fabric and wire storage that can be easily moved to the next place.

When Covid arrived I codified my already frequent habit of "indoor clothes" and "outdoor clothes", and things do stay cleaner longer, tho I have more in rotation at any given time.

I appreciate this  video for it's historical alternatives to the "floordrobe"