Luxury Housing Trends & Home Improvement Ideas

Laundry rooms are often tucked away either in the basement or on the first floor in an isolated room. Even though you have to catch up on laundry, it doesn’t mean you should be stuck doing it in the dreariest and loneliest part of your house. If you’re a multi-tasker, laundry room closets can give you the freedom to be near your family while finishing chores.

As you get older or busier with work, lugging your laundry down to the basement can seem like a horrible chore in itself, especially if you have several children with mounds of dirty clothes. Relocating the laundry room to the first floor in a large kitchen closet can reduce some of the hassles associated with washing clothes.

This closet pictured below has the washer and dryer as well as other cleaning supplies on high shelves where they are out of your children and pet’s reach. You can keep laundry moving while having breakfast with your family.

Whether you’re trying to save on energy costs by drying your clothes on the line instead of the dryer, or you just have some delicates that won’t stand tumbling in the machine, you may find a use for this handy little underwear dryer.

“This clever little invention will make drying your underwear convenient, discreet and classy. It can hang almost anywhere, includes 18 suspended clothing pins and can expand and contract to fit into any small space.”

In other words, you don’t have to hang your briefs (or Victoria Secrets) outside on the line in the yard for all the neighbors to admire.

The simple pine-wood dryer costs $24.

From the Conran Shop.

If you want to save energy this year–and you live in a climate that’s less damp than mine–you could cut out the clothes dryer and let your garments dry outside.  Even an energy saving dryer is a pretty big power suck, so using the sun and the wind can certainly lower your utility bill.

You don’t have to manually string lines up all over your house; just pick up an outdoor clothes drying rack.

The Whitney Design 3000 30-Line Outdoor Parallel-Style Clothes Dryer with Aluminum Arms (aside from having a very long name) makes efficient use of space, so even if you’ve got a small yard, you can dry your clothes outside.

And saving energy may not be the only perk:

“The benefits of air drying clothes are many–fabrics last longer, energy bills run lower, and clothes and sheets naturally smell better when hung outside–not to mention the health benefits of spending a few minutes outdoors in the sunshine.”

Pick up this unit for less than $70 at Amazon:

Whitney Outdoor Clothes Dryer

Laundry sinks tend to be big, utilitarian, and boring. They’re mounted on the wall and just hang there, looking bland and bulky.

If you’d like a laundry sink to wash your delicates in that is a tad more… delicate, you might appreciate something like this cheerful floral piece.

The wall sink is from Purple Sage Collections, and it can be used in the laundry room, but it can also be used outdoors. You could mount it on the wall of your house or shed and use it for washing hands and tools after working in the garden.

The sink is made from ceramic and the patterns are hand painted. The faucet isn’t included, so you’d have to order that separately.

$662 at Plumbing Fixtures

Is your washing machine doing all it could be to get rid of allergens and keep your clothes allergy-free (at least until the next cat or dog jumps on you)? If not, and it’s a concern that keeps you up nights, you may want to investigate the LG Electronics Steam Washer.

This high-speed washing machine uses “TrueSteam™” to penetrate fabrics, providing an “enhanced cleaning performance” that supposedly “reduces allergens by more than 95% with LG’s exclusive Allergiene™ Cycle.”

Hey, it beats taking Clariton every day.

Other features of the $1,600 washing machine include an extra wide door opening, a larger load capacity (which can save time and energy since you get to do fewer loads), sensors that determine the amount of detergent and water hardness and make automatic adjustments to the wash/rinse process, and a SteamFresh™ Cycle that lets you refresh and reduce wrinkles in up to 5 garments at one time.

Available at Home Depot

If you have a dedicated laundry room, then it’s probably not a big deal if your washer and dryer are out in the open for all to see (who’s going to go in your laundry room besides you anyway?). But if you live in a small house or a condominium, your washer and dryer may be sharing space in the kitchen or bathroom.

You don’t necessarily want visitors who might be using your guest bathroom to have to watch your undies spinning around in the dryer. A solution is to get front-loading washers and dryers that can be hidden behind cabinet doors. When you look at the row of cabinets, you won’t even be able to tell there’s a laundry area there.

Other laundry room organization ideas (that can be implemented in a “hidden” fashion) include behind door ironing boards, cabinets to hold detergent and the like, and portable tables for folding clothes. If your washer and dryer are on the floor, you can incorporate counter space on top, adding to the natural cabinet look (just be prepared to bend low to put clothes in and out of the appliances).

For those of us living in small homes, it’s important to make the best use of space, and if you can hide the fact that you even have laundry facilities, even better!

Luxury bathtubs with jets and effervescent bubble action aren’t all that new, but now you can get such features on your laundry sink too. That’s right, bubbles can even make your socks feel better.

The Delicair laundry basin from Aquatic Whirlpools offers “the perfect solution for delicate cleaning and care.”

The gentle bubbles are supposed to “lift away” dirt on knits and other delicate clothing items that normally require hand washing.

The Delicair basin doesn’t take up any more room than other laundry sinks, and features include an electronic control panel (what gadget fiend wouldn’t love a sink with a control panel?), air jets, and an automatic purge and dry cycle.

Aquatic Whirlpools

Front-loading washers are big in the laundry room these days, and most of the ones you’ve seen are probably the port-hole type where you can see your clothes spinning about inside. If that’s an attraction you can live without, you may appreciate these stainless steel laundry appliances from Asko. You still get front-loading on the washer and dryer, but there are no windows.

The washer and dryer can fit behind full-length doors or custom cabinet panels if you prefer your laundry appliances not be out in the open. As an added perk, the stainless steel resists fingerprints (”TouchProof” the company calls it). After all, who wants to spend time wiping down the washer and dryer?

Other features include an LCD display that you program “in a simple, easy to understand, left to right sequence,” delayed starts of up to 24 hours, and automatic load-balancing systems.

Asko

If you’re looking to add some sex appeal to the laundry room, this might be the washing machine for you. Just imagine some bikini babes draped over it (just like on the hoods of sports cars in those magazines), or if babes don’t float your boat, imagine speedo-clad hunks.

That’s right folks: red isn’t just for cars any more. Now you can get a fire engine red washer and dryer.

The washer model shown here is from Samsung and I saw a similar one from LG at Home Depot the other day. Both companies’ models are front loading (washing machines and dryers) and have optional storage drawer pedestals available (which is nice for raising the height a bit when you’re placing the washer and dryer side by side on the floor of the laundry room).

Prices start around $1,000.

If you like the look of freshly ironed clothes but wielding your little hand iron is too much of a chore (and you always feel dry cleaning is a bit expensive), then here’s a laundry tool for you:

The Tailors Steam Press is a “the professional-grade digital steam press with a pressing surface that is more than seven times larger than most handheld irons.” Not only is this bad boy bigger, it cuts your ironing time in half. Apparently you don’t have to be a pro at ironing or dry cleaning either, since the pressing is controlled by an automatic digital monitoring system to “ensure consistent results based on the kind of fabric (nylon, silk, rayon, wool, cotton, or linen)”. With digital monitoring, there shouldn’t be any chance of catching your clothes on fire either.

I guess that means you can toss your old iron to the curb for the garbage collector.

$250 from Hammacher Shclemmer:

The Tailor’s Steam Press.