Current obsession - chests of drawers (or should that be chest of drawerses)

What an everyday item... but so important. Especially if you have a secret stream running under the old part of your house, as I do, which runs directly under an important part of my walk-in wardrobe (where my nicest clothes are) and where that stream may or may not be making some of my clothes slightly dampish and maybe not smelling so great.

Time to elevate all low lying clothes I said.

Off to Ikea to buy a very plain, very white chest of drawers and move all the low clothes into my bedroom proper and into the chest . If the knobs are ugly, I thought, as they usually are, no fear, I will buy some pretty crystal or porcelain knobs and all will be well. I had in mind something like this:

Or this:

Nothing wrong with that plan, right?

Unfortunately I may have mentioned my idea to my husband. He forbad me to make the excursion to Ikea. He said I will not have THAT furniture in our bedroom (or words to that effect).

(Clarification required: I love Ikea especially their white open storage shelves great for children's bedrooms. My husband cannot bear it. He can't stand all the crowds of people there, and the check out line, and the fact you can't take shortcuts to escape, and always tries to point out shoddy workmanship in the items when we are there (which as you can gather is not very often).

His solution (with which I eventually agreed) - my divine mother in law, who is in possession of a great deal of unused furniture, has loaned us a very serviceable oak chest. It needs some more blue and white, maybe some chinese ginger jars but I do not want to overload the minimal furniture free environment in our bedroom.

Chests of drawers are somewhat out of fashion. We all love to display our clothes these days in neat Aerin Lauder style open shelves. But mine now stores all my camisoles, scarves, stockings, Tshirts, knobbly and silk knits, and jeans. Things you generally know you have and don't need to see on display. I think.

Unless you are going to strip them down and paint which is probably a task I am not up to, the wood needs to have a real patina, and not be too orangey. That means age. And age can cost. However you can still pick up nice ones, in fact antique chests seem to be better value than new ones, because, as I mentioned above, I think they are a bit out of fashion.

Here are the ones I like:

And here is my humble one.

There is only one pitfall - I put all my black cardigans (of which I have many) and black stockings (again, many) in one drawer together, and now I need a torch to find anything!

(Images: (1) Homes and Gardens (2) and (3) Ikea (4) Country Living (5) Joanna Henderson (6) Polly Wreford (7) Chris Everard (8) Elle Decor (9) Cookie (10) Jane)

Tweet

Pin It