A coat closet turned into a mudroom bench in a Horsham entry

The house had a standard coat closet immediately inside the front door — a door that opened into a narrow entry, so you were always stepping around it to get past. Inside, the plaster had been worked over the years and the paint was letting go in sheets.

The homeowners weren't short on closets. They were short on somewhere to put a coat down at the end of the day. So instead of putting the closet back the way it was, we took the door off and built it back as an open bench.

The walls inside came back to sound substrate first. The old surface was scraped, the failed areas cut out and replaced, and the whole cavity skimmed and primed before any millwork went in — a built-in only looks built-in if the wall behind it is flat.

The back and side walls are board-and-batten panel, painted the same white as the casing so the whole thing reads as one piece of architecture rather than a cabinet pushed into a hole. Three hooks at coat height, a shelf above with a small crown detail, and a bench seat in stained wood so the eye has somewhere to land — all white and it would have looked like a bathroom.

The floor is waterproof luxury vinyl plank, run continuously from the front door through the entry and into the bench so there's no threshold breaking up a space that small. In a narrow entry, every transition you remove makes the room read longer. 

Same square footage as the closet it replaced. The difference is that it's now where shoes and bags actually end up, instead of where the door gets left open.