When Balenciaga released its Closet campaign in January, featuring brand ambassador Kim Kardashian surrounded by Balenciaga handbags in her own closet, I understood that it was supposed to generate excitement around the reissue of the house’s Le City bag. But I ignored the bag, instead pinching my phone screen to zoom in for a closer look at the closet itself. With its blond-wood floors, accent lighting and wraparound open shelves, the space more closely resembled a luxury boutique than any home wardrobe.
That’s not the case for just celebrities either. In London’s Belsize Park, a financial-sector client with more discretion (and fewer Instagram followers) than Kardashian recently briefed her interior designer to base her dressing room scheme on one of the private shopping suites at Matchesfashion’s 5 Carlos Place townhouse.
While there’s nothing new about homeowners drawing bedroom decor inspiration from their favourite hotel rooms, these days wealthy clients are also taking cues from luxury retail. In turn, they (and their designers) are creating spaces for clothes, handbags and high-value collections that could pass for personal styling suites at any Bond Street shop.
“People want a high-end luxury boutique experience in their dressing rooms,” says Ben Johnson, director of the London-based Albion Nord design studio. “And boutiques have gone the way of wanting to feel more residential, with personal shopping suites and very tailored experiences. There’s a stronger link between the worlds of retail and residential design than we’ve seen before.”
The most aspirational closets are no longer just closets — they’re dressing rooms, and they’re new residential must-haves. “At the top end of the market, it’s absolutely critical now,” says Mark Lawson, partner at specialist property agency The Buying Solution.
It’s all a part of the “principal suite”. In the past, this might have comprised a bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, but the concept has evolved into floor-through configurations that can include a bedroom, two bathrooms and his-and-hers (or hers-and-hers, or his-and-his) dressing rooms — possibly with a meditation room or office thrown in. The most desired of these spaces is the dressing room, Lawson says.
“The amount of time and focus around dressing rooms in conversations with our clients has increased dramatically over the last 10 years,” says Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, founder and chief executive of property development company Banda Property, phoning from a nearly finished project at Chelsea Barracks. “The dressing room has become so important. It’s more than just a space to get dressed and undressed — it’s a sanctuary inside the house.”
Creating a personalised, luxurious-feeling dressing room goes beyond upgrading the hardware on a run of fitted wardrobes. A wardrobe is a place to store clothes; a dressing room is more ambitious. “Your dressing room can represent any of the thousand different variations of you,” says Hugo Lindsay-Fynn, director of boutique architectural practice Palladian. An island might feature a glass top and shallow, lockable drawers — the better to store, display and safeguard watches and jewellery. Humidity- and temperature-controlled rooms for handbags aren’t out of the ordinary.
There’s no preference for open rails versus closed cupboards, although custom ceiling-mounted rails with inset lighting can become design features in their own right. Conversely, Lindsay-Fynn likes to remind clients that cupboard doors can keep their boutique-like haven from feeling like a retail stockroom. “Not everyone who has very expensive dressing rooms is very tidy.”
Sometimes those doors harbour surprises. Interior designer Hollie Bowden devised “a walk-in jewellery case” for one of her clients, a collector who wanted to be able to see her favourite pieces. Bowden upholstered the backs of the double doors leading into the jewellery wardrobe with silk moiré and pushed pins into the fabric, so her client could hang necklaces.
Making the space multifunctional is key. Building in a bar or a beverage station with a hot tap for tea means clients don’t have to leave the principal suite when they feel parched. And more clients are requesting desks or workstations built in (Lisa Todd Wexley, Nicole Ari Parker’s character in And Just Like That . . . edits documentaries from a desk in her vast private dressing room).
“We’ve recently done something that I really want to copyright” in a Southbank penthouse, Albion Nord’s Johnson says: “A beauty pantry.” As this particular dressing room wraps around to the bathroom, double doors open into a teak-clad space stocked with beauty products, slippers, robes and everything needed for a home-spa experience. He has also seen wardrobes with mezzanine levels (like a library, but for clothes) and bespoke clothes cataloguing systems.
Thanks to social media, these previously private spaces are now front and centre on Instagram. Whenever Rosie Huntington-Whiteley or Jennifer Aniston share mirror selfies or “get ready with me” content, the reaction inevitably includes comments on the dreaminess of their dressing rooms.
Lisa Adams is the Los Angeles-based designer behind a number of entries in online rankings of the best celebrity dressing rooms. When she launched her company, LA Closet Design, in 2007, “dressing rooms were really an afterthought. I saw the advent of kitchens as the heart of a home, and I thought, ‘What about closets?’” Today she takes on 20 to 25 projects a year, with a typical budget of about $225,000. She’s currently in the planning stages for Jennifer Lopez’s new dressing room.
For Adams’s celebrity clients, no feature is too extravagant. Lately she’s designed a number of dressing rooms incorporating glam stations “with a three-way mirror, a tailoring platform and different access points for the team to come in”. Homeowners without six figures to spend on their closets can tap into her nous through her online shop, where she offers custom drawer dividers and purse pillows, which she says are “great to maintain the shape and longevity of a bag when it’s sitting on a shelf”.
Much of the deliberation and effort that goes into high-end dressing room design will be imperceptible to everyone except the specific person whose life it optimises. Something as apparently simple as a mirror can be the locus of technological whizz-bangery. Full-length mirrors that are actually screens can be equipped with high-res cameras on a three-second delay — the better to see a full-length view of the back of your outfit. Or take a selfie.
Looking ahead, Adams anticipates more retail inspiration filtering into closet design at every level of the market in the next five to 10 years. “When you walk into a luxury boutique, it’s well lit, it’s not cluttered, there’s space for everything, you can see everything at first glance, there’s seating — it just feels welcoming. People want that feeling at home, too.”
Designers, by the way, aren’t immune to the charms of a dressing room of one’s own. When Bowden and her partner moved into a new house in November 2022, one of her first decisions was to claim the bedroom next to theirs as her dressing room. “It’s a big, beautiful room that would have been perfect for our children or a lovely spare room, but I said, ‘No way — this is going to be our dressing room’.”
The space is still a work in progress, but Bowden knows that when finished, it will be carpeted and incorporate a blend of fitted and freestanding pieces, such as the two antique dressers she’s going to lacquer green or peach. “This beautiful dressing room is the biggest luxury for me. Just having my clothes edited and hung neatly makes for a really good start to the day, every day,” she says. “It’s changed my life.”
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