From chaos to calm: How to design the perfect 'bootility' room for a busy family home

Let's kick up the style in that boot room

A rustic dream of a bootility. Doggy Daycare range of bedding and accessories sophieallport.com.

A suburban front hall, a traditional back-kitchen, or that multi-purpose spot to pry off your boots and wing your filthy socks into the washing machine. The boot-room is an established must-have for a busy family home. 

It comes in a thousand guises to suit you, the kids and even the dog. Rural boot-rooms are traditional, hybrid circulation spaces nick-named “bootility” rooms. 

They work especially hard as the step between the rigours of outdoors and domestic sanctuary, often tripping into a fully detailed laundry. 

Whether you’re able to keep the outer wear out there in the front hall, or your coats, shoes and gear are tangled into the utility area, try these tips to elevate any struggling hall to stout boot room’s style and better everyday performance.

Balance. Where you must make your boot and coat area jive with a utility space, concentrate on taking the weight of back-stage antics out of sight of the sleeker ranges of your kitchen. 2.4m of wall-length at the end of a galley kitchen (60cm deep with 80cm of standing to the front), provides enough room for two well-designed parallel boot room/utility nooks, 120cm each side of a short partition wall. 

Two built-in shoulder height shelves over a 120cm counter flown over a side-by-side washer/dryer set can answer a lot of questions. Add slim timber batten to the front edge of the shelving to corral detergents. Add (in or on-wall) pocket or articulated secret-doors to zone off this service space. 

For a parallel boot-room nook facing an appliance stack — deploy a built-in or free-standing bench preferably with integrated storage, hooks for coats overhead (150cm for adults, 120cm for kids). Open storage cubbies set across the ceiling, and you’re there. 

Most kitchen suppliers can detail your utility and boot room, incorporating additional storage in the wider CAD design of a new kitchen. Standard kitchen units are fantastic dupes for bespoke wooden cabinetry.

In the closet. Blind storage, largely out of sight is your friend. The more public and polite the space is expected to be, the more discreet disguise will matter. 

Built-in or built-out with modular units similar to those used for kitchens and wardrobes, your hall or boot-room/utility can swallow that winter ballast, presenting a calm, elegant face for family and visitors alike. Save serious money by banking inexpensive self-assembly tall storage units from say IKEA (Besta, Billy, Sektion or Pax) into a high-end look, fastening them to each other and the wall. 

Concentrate on as seamless a finish as possible, and a silky swing or slide to any doors. With areas of open storage – what can you curate to look civilised? For high cabinetry — use flip up doors to save your back. Don’t leave this or any tall storage unit open to the floor. 

Include a raised base and kick-boards, and crown moulding for added stability, class, and easy sweep outs. Instagram is rich with economical hacks for anyone who can handle a measuring tape, level, drill, and a paint roller.

Anchor with character. Many utility/hall combinations flow quietly in a grey stream from other primary spaces, especially when we’ve used the same flooring tile throughout downstairs. They are all function but offer little charm when they could be so much more ergonomic and attractive. 

Kick up the style and presence of your boot-room area, adding warmth and definition with a robust, feature wall-paper that will push back the ceiling, and show off the lines of twiggy hallstands, shelving and kick legged benches. 

Adding character, Washed Shibori wallpaper shows off the line of a kick-leg bench. Delivered as three panels, €229, aprilandthebear.com. Similar floor standing boot-racks from €92, wayfair.ie.

The addition of that vital indoor/outdoor rug can be an aesthetic moment too. 

Down by the back door, take the lead from your kitchen cabinetry and colourways. Consider wall lights or directionals spots with added texture and dimensionality with panels or bead-board to further define the space.

On the bench. A bench with either a shelf or even internal storage is the principal furnishing in many boot-rooms. If your overworked bootility is an extension of your kitchen, you really cannot be without one. 

A free-standing or built-in bench (part of a high American-style hutch unit) allows you to dump your bags at a comfortable height and sit down to slough off your outerwear. Create a logical relationship between the bench position and the place your shoes are going. 

Removable seat covers and genuinely comfy landing? Highly practical. Baskets, boxes, rails – that valuable area under an open bench is ideal. Otherwise detail a thick plank seat over a lift-up trunk or in-frame drawer. 

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Your best prompts for organising this and everything else, is exploring exactly how you live right now — what drives you mad? Boots and dirty runners are a bulky nuisance. Racks and under-bench cubbies will put manners on the shoe mountain.

Hot halls. Just because you’re keeping the hall or bootility down at 18C to trim the bills, doesn’t mean we should check out of style with that radiator. 

Bundy loop radiators have been a vernacular for circulation areas for more than a century, and they are offered in delightful changing-room radiator benches, perfect for warming yourself on a return from winter’s furious rages. 

Warm up a perch using this Tuba Bench seat radiator, €1,064, theradiatorcentre.com (UK). For a similar style and less of a spend? The Windsor Bundy loop design by Milano, 480mm x 850mm, from €427, bestheating.ie.

No space, no problem, go vertical with a column rad’ to use a sliver of wall. Check the compression seals on your exterior doors every year, and detail your radiator whatever it’s prolife, with a thermostatic radiator valve (TRV) to create a thermal zone.

Off the hook. Hybrid back door utility areas can become a muck-spattered disaster area of listing hurls’, erupting linen baskets, and fallen wellies. In terms of undressing by the back or front door, we’re also dropping off the petro-chemical nasties on our shoes, leaving coats to dry and preparing to enter the clean, dry reaches of the house. 

Invest in robust hooks and shelving, set into the substrate or secured to upright panels and partition walls with the right fixings. This will prevent piggy-backed coats and bags from a November collapse some windy night. 

Every hook and shelf you buy, including shelving being slid into framed units, has a maximum loading provided, usually in kgs and a suggested span for shelving supports. Don’t ignore this.

Everyone should have a spot for their own gear, so it’s worth assigning micro storage to meet individual needs. Busy sports mad kids will appreciate somewhere to (easily) hang their tennis racket, and a logical, short lob to the laundry basket if we’re doubling up with the utility-room.

Lotto win? Think about a shower room as part of your boot room suite.

Dogs and cats . They might be nice set dressing for a Downton Abbey inspired boot-room, but the needs of pets should be met if you’re bedding them down in the cabinet-work. In reality, you may find that more sensitive pets will want to be closer to you rather than being banished to distant reaches of the house. 

They will enjoy cool, calm quarters they can rely on. Using a dog cubby in your built-in bootility solution? Ensure that all dogs have plenty of head room to both sit up and spread out without the danger of being trampled by passers-by. 

Calm and unfussed, using a matching storage bench, cubbies and hooks. If the dog is part of your boot-room/utility design, zone the sleeping area to that individual pets needs. Image: gardentrading.co.uk.

This will of course depend both on the breed and the individual dog’s preferences. All bedding should be off the floor, out of any draughts from exterior doors and suitable for full laundering as needed. 

Running machines can create a sudden rise in temperature — double check the thermostats on your CH and the ventilation are delivering a dry, comfortable environment.