Let’s call it the Carrie Bradshaw effect. If you’re a person who takes an interest in fashion, you’ve likely found yourself lusting after the Sex and the City heroine’s impressive shoe collection and the subsequent massive shoe closet that was bestowed upon her by her other half Mr. Big. While a shoe closet on this scale is the stuff of dreams for most of us, there are plenty of celebrities, both big and small, for whom it is not so much a luxury as it is an organizational necessity.
Here are some of our favorite celebrity shoe closets and a few lessons in organization that can be learned from them.
Mariah Carey
Source: via instyle.com
Mariah Carey designed a massive gold leaf trimmed, bleached wood shoe closet in her 12,000-square-foot New York City condo with the help of well-known interior designer Mario Butta. The closet is really more of a shoe room with floor-to-ceiling shelving that looks more like a high-end boutique than a closet, and holds over 1,000 pairs of shoes – the portion of Carey’s collection that is not in storage.
Organizationally, Carey’s shoes are displayed boutique-style and arranged in perfect pairs pointing outwards as you would expect to see in a high-end shoe store. This is the key to the organizational message that we can take away from Carey’s shoe closet; the more visible a pair of shoes is, the more likely you are to wear them.
To take a design cue from Carey’s impressive shoe room, try displaying your shoes in neatly arranged pairs on compartmentalised shelving units. Keep the shelves free of other clutter and dust, and in addition to creating a creative, boutique-like environment in your closet, you will undoubtedly find yourself wearing that forgotten pair of stilettos that you still love so much.
Christina Aguilera
Source: via weheartit.com
Like Mariah Carey, superstar singer Christina Aguilera keeps her shoes displayed boutique-style on high shelving units in her Los Angeles home, complete with a rolling ladder on rails that she can use to reach the top of the shelves where she keeps her taller boots.
Unlike Carey’s comparatively more austere approach to décor in her shoe room, Aguilera’s closet reflects her strong personality with its pink color scheme and leopard print carpeting. Aguilera also organizes her shoe closet by designer allowing her to locate items more quickly in what she refers to as a little family of designs from the same design house.
Don’t have enough shoes in your closet to warrant a rolling ladder and sky high shelving units? No problem. You can still employ a bit of Aguilera’s organizational savvy by coming up with your own system of cataloging the items that you do have in your closet. Whether you want to follow Aguilera’s lead and arrange your shoes by designer or would rather group them according to physical attributes like color, heel height, or season, having your own organizational system will enable you to locate that perfect pair to complement your look in the blink of an eye.
Kim Cattrall
Source: via smashcult.blogspot.com
Kim Cattrall’s 44-square-foot walk-in closet is a breath of fresh air in white Lucite, silver-framed doors, and floor-to-ceiling shelves with her shoes displayed boutique-style. Cattrall claims that she created the closet in her California home as a “sanctuary with sunlight” that acts as a sort of division between her bedroom and bath.
Cattrall admits to having wanted a space such as this for many years. She used to have to share a tiny shoe rack with her partner and, to compensate, would store her shoes all over the house as if they were works of art. She now enjoys the time she spends in her “sanctuary” by making sure that all of her shoes are arranged (loosely by her own admission) by heel height and toe (open or closed).
The take away message from Kim Cattrall’s closet is that in creating a space for storing your clothes and shoes, you are doing much more than just creating a place to put your stuff. A shoe closet (or any other closet, for that matter) should reflect your personality and ultimately be a place that you find restful and inspiring; you should enjoy the time you spend in there and, in turn, it should reward you by enhancing your sartorial creativity.
Granted, not all of us have the space for a boutique-style walk-in shoe closet, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t still benefit from some of the design ideas apparent in these impressive celebrity shoe closets. Whether you are working with a space as large as an extra bedroom or as small as a designated corner of a shelving unit, the important thing in creating an organized, celebrity-inspired shoe closet it that it not only serves a practical purpose, but makes you feel great at the same time.