I have never been a person to fold clothes neatly or make my bed properly. In fact, I’ve rarely done much more than brute force my stuff into the various dark corners in my room. But in all rooms but the bedroom, there is an order to things — a way in which I drape the throw blanket over the right armrest of my couch, an exquisitely clean countertop, a painfully well-kept stock of cast-iron skillets. But those things are that way, mostly, for visitors, while my bedroom is not. Apart from keeping things off the ground (anything small enough to fit into my dog’s mouth will find its way there), I don’t see what’s to be gained by obsessing over tidiness in the one room I’m free of second-hand judgment. At least that’s how I felt until I stumbled upon the simple, spatioeconomic and, dare I say, pedagogic joys of the Stax closet storage system.
Made by new Toronto-based furniture and houseware makers at Kvell, Stax is made up of four storage containers of different sizes, three sizes of “dividers,” and a big hamper. My greatest issue with most other storage and room-organizing pickups is their looks (I am that vain) and a lack of customizable options. My closet doesn’t look like your closet and your closet doesn’t look like the closet they shot the pretty example images in, and therein lies the beauty of Stax. You don’t need all the pieces, just the ones that best fit whatever issues befall your situation.
I wound up with a unit of large storage, two units of small storage, plenty of dividers to go in each and the hamper. My shoe collection, once forming a weird sneaker prayer circle around my lamp, has found a home in the small storage dividers; my pants had bent every hanger I own out of shape but now they stack up neatly in the large storage; my exercise gear, relegated to a tacky zip-up bag under my bed, now has a home — and is, subsequently, far more difficult to ignore.
