A version of this story originally appeared on the Strategist US.
My boyfriend and I share the same maximalist approach to laundry: Avoid it at all costs until, one day, you’re underwear-less. At that point, we’re forced to stuff the mounds of dirty clothes and linens that have inevitably piled up into two or three Ikea bags and drag them all down to the laundromat in one giant, inconvenient trip. There are lots of annoying things about this, but one of the most acute is that we need a lot of space on clothes-drying racks in order to air-dry all of our damp workout gear, button-ups, and jeans at once.
The thing is, we live in a flat that doesn’t exactly have a lot of space. Even though the heavy-duty, Honey-Can-Do drying rack I bought last August gives us more surface area to air-dry our clothes than we’ve ever had, we usually have more items than can fit. And we definitely don’t have room for a second standing drying rack: When ours is at full mast, it takes up most of the free space in our den-slash–dining room–slash–home office. For a while, we just hung damp clothes from the shower-curtain rod and a coat rack in the entryway, basically turning our home into a laundromat for at least 24 hours at a time (because we also take our time putting clothes away, of course). But that started to become untenable, not to mention unbearable.
Then I found this hanging metal drying rack on Amazon. Designed and manufactured by Dutch home-goods company Brabantia, the clever little thing hooks onto an open door and stays there, letting me hang all the laundry I need without taking up an inch of precious floor space. Because it attaches to the top of a door, it leaves plenty of clearance for extra-long items, like my jumpsuits or maxi dresses, that would usually touch the floor when folded over the standing drying rack. Attached to the top of a door, the rack is also high enough that there’s plenty of space for us to move freely beneath it when nothing is hanging from it. (The cheerful, shiny red finish also makes it easy enough to avoid.)
Despite its small footprint, the hanging rack is quite sturdy, too. We can hang about 12 to 15 damp pieces of clothing from it, and never once has it collapsed or fallen. It’s handily solved the overflow issue we have, and because it’s so much lighter and smaller than my big drying rack, I find myself using it when I’m hand-washing smaller items. The rungs create a nice flat surface on which to lay out delicates, swimsuits, even sweaters in a pinch. Has it made us do laundry more? No. But it has made our apartment feel — and look — a little less like a 24-hour laundromat when we do it.
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