Introduction

Six months ago, newlyweds Carly and Rob Kuper packed up their life in Phoenix and headed east to Philadelphia. Like most people making a big move, they were happy to be leaving some things behind (110-degree temperatures, for one) yet sad about others — such as palm trees and roomy his-and-hers closets.

Their new one-bedroom apartment had a single clothes closet — which wasn’t even in the bedroom and came with just one rod. They added another rod, but boxes and boxes of clothes still sat in stacks with nowhere to go. Most belonged to Carly, a communications manager for a marketing firm and, she admits, “a true girly girl. I like shoes and clothes, clothes, clothes.” Although Rob, a professor of landscape architecture and a borderline neatnik, has far fewer garments, those he does have take up a lot of real estate — after all, he’s six foot seven. “A typical T-shirt of his is the length of a pair of my pants,” says Carly. No surprise, then, that clothes belonging to five-foot-two Carly often got lost amid the XXLs. “Getting dressed was a real chore,” she says.

To bring order to the Kupers’ chaos, Real Simple enlisted Rachel Siegel, founder of Spruce, an organizing company in San Francisco. “The closet had no rhyme or reason to it,” says Siegel. “Skirts mixed with jackets, Carly’s dresses with Rob’s shirts. Shoes were thrown willy-nilly on the floor.” She set to work with a wardrobe-culling strategy, simple organizing systems, and budget-friendly tools. The result: a closet with a place for everything, from Carly’s size 4 dresses to Rob’s size 16 shoes.