Designing the Perfect Mudroom: Tips for a Functional and Stylish Space

Coming out of the season of mud puddles, rain boots, and umbrellas and moving into one filled with beach days and kids running through the sprinklers, it got us thinking about one of the most useful, but sometimes overlooked, rooms a home can have.

Importance of a Mudroom

In a place like Michigan, as we move from one messy season to the next, the usefulness of this room cannot be overstated. With spring and summer on the brain, we thought it would be a good time to talk about how to design one of the most versatile, hardworking rooms in a home: the mudroom. Though these rooms are often luxuries, we find them to be one of the most useful rooms in a home – especially a Midwestern home where each season brings no shortage of mess.

Key Questions for Designing a Mudroom

When we begin designing a space for our clients, the most crucial task is to compile a well thought out list of wants and needs. This is key, both for understanding how our clients will use the space, and to also understand how they want it to look so it both functions and brings joy from an aesthetic perspective. Sometimes the hardest part of this task is knowing the important questions to ask, which is where we as designers come in.

When thinking about the design of a mudroom in particular, here are some of the most important questions we ask our clients:

• Do you prefer closed or open storage? The convenience of open storage for quickly grabbing a coat on the way out the door, or do you prefer a more orderly looking space?
• Do you want a bench to be able to sit to put shoes on?
• How much shoe storage do you need?
• Do you need to store specific sports items/bags?
• Do you want a cubbie style storage system (open or closed) for each child/person in the home?
• How do you prefer to store shoes? Is a low drawer beneath the bench helpful for younger children to easily throw shoes and keep them hidden, or would you rather have open space below a bench for shoes to tuck under easily and out of the way?
• What are all the items you will be storing?
• Do you have a desire to hang coats inside a cabinet on a closet style rod, or would hooks be more suitable, whether open or behind doors?
• Do you want to incorporate a utility sink with some landing space for cleaning off dirty shoes, clipping flowers, etc?
• Would a drop zone for keys, sunglasses, sunscreen, mail, etc. be useful here?
• Will you be storing and cleaning products, vacuums, brooms, etc?
• Do you want to display a bulletin board for collecting school photos, notes, calendar, etc?

These questions will provide a great starting point for making sure the mudroom is designed to properly meet all the various needs.

Functional and Aesthetic Considerations

Once we’ve tackled the way the space needs to function, we move onto the pretty stuff! When deciding on a finish for the mudroom cabinetry, flooring, wallcovering, and countertops, it’s helpful to think about how much wear and tear you foresee happening to the space. In a mudroom, durable materials are key simply due to the amount of traffic and inevitable snow, mud and grass that comes through the door year round.

For instance, if you have a larger family with a lot of young children moving frequently through the space with school bags, toys, and who knows what else, perhaps a crisp white mudroom isn’t the best choice due to the more delicate nature of a painted finish on cabinetry. We often recommend a more forgiving, stained wood cabinet that tends to be easier to touch up and helps hide some of the inevitable, let’s say patina, that happens over time. To avoid the room feeling too dark when going this route, we like to keep the rest of the finishes in the space lighter.

We love a crisp, clean white mudroom as much as anyone, and if you’ve got your heart set on it and it functions for you, go for it! We simply want to help increase awareness of all the different things to consider when designing not only a mudroom, but any space in your home.

For flooring, we almost always recommend some sort of tile, whether that be porcelain or a natural slate due to their cleanability and water resistance. The peace of mind a tile floor provides when a child brings half a snowman through the door cannot be overlooked.

Creative Storage Solutions

Depending on the amount of space available, a mudroom can also be a great opportunity for storage of other items that tend to not have a specific home otherwise. In this mudroom, we designed two large tall cabinets next to each other on an unused wall in the room. One cabinet we designed to be storage for all the vacuums and brooms. We strategically installed an outlet inside the cabinet to have the ability to charge plug-in vacuums while not in use. The top section of the cabinet stores extra shopping bags, a great spot close to the garage entrance of the home for quickly grabbing a bag to get out the door.

The adjacent tall cabinet is a mixed use of storage, mostly overflow shoe storage for seasonal footwear like bulkier snow boots, as well as a home for bulk paper towel storage and beach towels and beach bags.

The main area of the mudroom utilizes a mix of closed and open storage for a good mix of visual interest as well as function. The small bench section in the middle provides a comfortable spot to put on shoes, while the open space below it offers a great spot for wet shoes to tuck under out of the walkway. A few pullout drawers under the bench provide shoe storage that can be accessed with ease. The hooks for coats in the center section provide just enough space for the most frequently used coats without making the space feel cluttered. Behind the closed doors you will find school bags, lunch boxes, and sports bags, as well as a landing spot for keys, mail, and sunglasses. The closed doors on top provide the perfect space for hats, gloves, and scarves.

In the top section of both areas, we chose to design open cabinets both for the ease of accessing the baskets above and for the visual interest a decorative basket would add. These baskets ended up being a great opportunity for storing all the variety of necessary home items including extra light bulbs, felt pads, command hooks, batteries, etc.

Although this mudroom is beautiful and functional, we know that sometimes a floor plan doesn’t allow for a whole dedicated mudroom. In these cases, there are creative ways to incorporate some of the benefits of a full mudroom. It becomes even more important to prioritize the needs this space would have to accommodate since not everything may be able to be stored here. Even by just creating a built-in bench for some coat and shoe storage can prove well worth it in the end goal of making your home function better for you.