Small spaces, creative solutions
California Closets designers see problems as opportunities for practical, appealing storage
A creative designer who loves to solve problems meets a busy homeowner who needs help organizing small and narrow spaces in her home.
For Danielle Lapointe and Sheina Macadam, it was a friendship made in design heaven.
“When I see the problems people have, it’s like solving a puzzle. I love to make something great and functional out of little spaces that would otherwise be useless,” says Lapointe, a senior designer with Burnaby-based California Closets. She keeps working until she finds a solution, no matter how awkward the space.
It was that persistence that helped her solve the puzzle that Sheina Macadam first presented to her. Macadam and her partner had a small closet with a sharp slant in its ceiling. In true California Closets form, Lapointe designed a fitted structure for organizing shelves and gave Macadam three-dimensional renderings before installing an organizing system and shelves constructed with sustainable materials.
“It was so fun,” recalls Macadam, a surgeon based in Vancouver. “We are both perfectionists and I loved how she paid attention to every detail and was able to come up with solutions to problems we encountered while trying to fit sections for hanging clothes, folded clothes and bags.”
California Closets designers know their work is only superficially about décor and storage – clearing space in a household offers homeowners an opportunity to find peace of mind.
“I love my job because I’m making people’s lives a bit easier. People often only see the value in being organized once they have it.”
One of the keys to career satisfaction for Lapointe is designing something for an unused area that is a relatively small “fix” but makes such a positive impact by helping an entire household become organized. Recently, Lapointe worked with a homeowner on a small closet that was just big enough for a stacked washer and dryer. She managed to fit a square panel with tracks for hooks for hanging items and a shelf for laundry detergent. The fixture looks unassuming and small, but it solved annoying problem for the homeowner.
Lapointe recalls working in other clients’ homes where the family has no space designated for shoes and outdoor clothing in their entryway. She transforms these spaces with small self-contained structures, like mini-mudrooms complete with cabinetry below and above a seating area and hooks for coats. It clears up the family’s problematic clutter immediately.
“When you have a client who needs to organize a large space, it’s not difficult to make it functional, but I get the biggest response from people whose lives are improved by a relatively small addition,” says Lapointe.
“It’s often the simplest designs that get my clients saying, ‘this is amazing.’ It’s always those clients who say, ‘I can’t believe how much easier my life is now that I’m organized,” she adds.
Lapointe and her California Closets colleagues custom-design rooms to create multiple uses in one space and take advantage of vertical space. In a final stage of the consultation process, they use proprietary three-dimensional software to display the finishes, accents, accessories and lighting of the new organization systems. All materials hail from Canada, Italy and California and comply with California’s strict emissions standards.
In yet another home, Lapointe designed 14-inch-deep closets on each side of a couple’s bed along with closed cabinetry above, in effect surrounding the entire bed and wall with cabinetry and creating an alcove at the head of the bed, lit with overhead mood lighting.
It was a shallow space normally ignored except for a couple of bedside tables. Adding this extra storage allowed her clients to store dozens of shoes and purses, clothing, towels and baskets, as well as a large jewelry collection all hidden behind doors in a sleek and contemporary design that didn’t overwhelm the room and would otherwise be unused space. For a family of five in a three-bedroom condo, that is prime storage real estate.
When Sheina Macadam eventually moved to a larger home, she commissioned Lapointe and California Closets to create a floating two-tier bookshelf to occupy a long hallway. In a clever move, they hid the narrow vertical supports of the bookcase with book cover spines.
“I absolutely love the floating bookshelf,” says Macadam. “It makes the hallway a showpiece and I love that we made an area that might otherwise be ignored into a beautiful space.”