Home Storage Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly
These days, it feels as though the face of home organizing is built upon a faulty tower of ugly plastic bins. While some might equate home organizing with throwing said bins at any clutter conundrums, I’m here to firmly assert my stance against this practice. Why? A. Like I said, plastic bins are ugly (and of course, environmentally taxing). And B. It does not follow that the more bins you own, the more organized you are. In other words, organizing need not be so plastic-y and product-y!
In my quest to prove that home organizing can be chic too (and not just the ugly stepchild of interior design), I had the good fortune of discovering two brands giving storage products a serious upgrade: Open Spaces and KEPT. What I love most is that their products are more like beautiful objects and less like boring frosted plastic bins.
Consider Open Spaces the minimalist, Brooklynized version of The Container Store. While its SKUs are significantly less than The Container Store’s, its chic-looking bins, wire baskets and nesting trays can be stretched to serve multiple uses and functions. KEPT’s products are similarly sleek in design and minimalist in scope. Whereas it’s all too easy to use plastic as a material for super-duper large bins, KEPT says ‘nope, we’re doing things a little differently around here. Let’s swap it out with a faux suede.’ Their Closet Storage Set makes me want to buy fifteen more sweaters just so I can have an excuse to use them all.
Just like Open Spaces, KEPT keeps its product SKUs to a delightful minimum. Of course, minimalism has something to do with this, but their underlying message is also one of restraint in the bin-buying category. Hopefully, with less stuff, you’ll require fewer bins. But just the same, if you had a lot of stuff, you don’t need to stuff it all into bins. Why? As I’ve said before, sometimes there’s nothing like simply reaching for a product unimpeded by the barrier of a bin. Also, sometimes you can forget what’s in all those opaque bins, even if you have labels proudly displayed on the outside of each one.
My wish is that organizing products blend more seamlessly into the spaces they occupy, while also becoming OBJETS in their own right. Overall, however, home organizing is less about product and based more upon the opulence of emptiness and space. I think it’s an exciting time to be in the space (no pun intended!) and I think we’re in the midst of some exciting new progress on the home storage front.