Room by room
The first room, and the smallest
An entryway does more work per square foot than any room in the house. It is the first thing you see coming home and the first thing a guest sees arriving, and it absorbs every coat, bag, shoe and set of keys belonging to everyone who lives there.
How we plan a entryway
Every entryway starts with the room, not the furniture
It is also the room people most often skip, because it is small and because nobody sits in it. That is a mistake worth correcting early: it sets the tone for everything past it, and it is the cheapest room in the house to transform.
Our design experts have finished and photographed 16 entryways, across contemporary, farmhouse, traditional and Scandinavian.
Storage in a small footprint
The question is always the same: where does everything land. If there is no designated place for shoes, bags and keys, they land on the floor and the console, and no amount of styling fixes that.
What usually works in a narrow hall is vertical. Hooks at two heights, one for adults and one low enough for children to use without being asked twice. A bench with closed storage underneath, because the shoes you see are the mess you see. And a surface at hip height for keys and post, kept deliberately small so it cannot become a dumping ground.
A runner wants three to six inches of floor showing on each side, and it needs to be something that takes winter boots.
Light and first impressions
Most entryways have one overhead light and no daylight, which is why they so often feel like a corridor rather than a room. A mirror opposite or adjacent to the light source does more than anything else, borrowing what light there is and giving the space depth.
Then one thing worth looking at. A piece of art, a good light, a bench with real presence. An entryway only needs a single considered object to stop reading as leftover space.
“Real rooms, photographed on completion. No renders, no stock photography, no AI-generated interiors.”
Every photograph on this page
16 finished, photographed on completion