A Sneaky Way to Create a (Really Big) Closet in Your Small Space

Living in a tiny apartment? Short on closet space? Here’s a clever way to make a walk-in (yes, walk-in!) closet in your small apartment, and create a cozy spot for sleeping at the same time.

You’ve probably guessed from the photo above that the solution is lofting your bed. If your ceilings are tall enough, you’ll wind up with plenty of space below for a closet and plenty of space for sleeping above. And the underside of the loft provides a good place to hang curtains, so your clothes are truly hidden away instead of adding visual clutter to your apartment.

Above: This Finnish apartment, from Adalmina’s Secret via Apartment Therapy, has a dreamy walk-in closet that any fashionista would envy—all tucked beneath a loft bed.

Holly Becker of Decor8 shares this super cute bedroom solution by interior designer Robin Sillau (in her own home), who created a walk-in closet and an extra living space with a lofted bed paired with a creative use of curtains.

This clever setup is from a Swedish apartment spotted on Refinery29. Keeping the loft height short means you might have to duck a bit to get to your clothes, but, on the other hand, you won’t have to duck when waking up in the morning. Those stairs do seem a bit precarious (you might want to put the carafe somewhere else), but there’s storage underneath, so that’s a plus. The curtain can be drawn across the whole thing to provide a little privacy.

I searched high and low to find an example of the loft-bed-with-closet-below that featured a run-of-the-mill loft bed, of the kind you could buy from a big box store. I found this example from Bleikt, which, thanks to curtains surrounding the closet, manages to make the whole thing look pretty classy. (You might have to add a few horizontal bars to your loft bed to make this work.)

And this last example, from Alvhem via Naifandtastic, makes the very most of a loft bed setup with a workspace and a walk-in closet below. It’s further proof that with a little ingenuity (and a little ladder-climbing), you can fit a lot of living into a little space.