Backpack Central

Assigned Locker Space Works as Well At Home as It Does at School

In most schools, lockers are the time-honored storage solution, the place where students stow jackets, lunch boxes, red-inked English papers and bulky sports gear. Some families are taking that smart lesson home, setting up locker-like spaces, often right inside the door where kids charge into the house and drop their backpacks.

Although you can sometimes find the real thing -- either vintage or brand-new -- home lockers usually are not the satisfyingly slammable metal variety found in school hallways. But tall, open, built-in wooden cabinets, complete with hooks, cubbies, drawers and movable shelves, do the job just as well.

When John and Mila Bartos renovated their house in Northwest, they asked architect Chris Snowber and builder Mauck Zantzinger to include such clutter-control space. Now each of the three children -- Payton, 6, Cade, 4, and even 2-year-old Winn -- has a designated locker. Their parents share a fourth. The built-ins, says Mila Bartos, are "all about storage and functionality for children."

The Bartos children enter the house through a side door that leads directly to their lockers. The area is a bit wider than a hallway, strategically placed between the combination kitchen/dining room and a smaller television room. On the wall across from the lockers, a row of pegs holds the jackets and hats that used to overstuff the front hall closet.

Two tall storage spaces are built on either side of a wooden bench, which has a hinged seat to hold more. These days, shelves hold swimming goggles, small shoes, picture books. Payton, the oldest, already is involved in plenty of activities, evidenced by a Girl Scouts bag and ballet tote.

As children grow, their gear tends to get bigger and bulkier, going from swim fins and crayons to heavy backpacks and bike helmets. With this in mind, the builder installed removable shelves. "When they get older, they can store their lacrosse sticks and so on in there," says Mila Bartos.

The designated spaces have made it easier to keep the house tidy, says Bartos. "Even the baby knows where his stuff is. They are responsible for putting their stuff in their cubbies. They just used to dump it wherever they felt like it."

Bartos says now she could use just one more organizing feature: a bulletin board. Right now, field trip permission slips and health forms go in a top shelf of the lockers, along with stray toys and library books to return.

The family sacrificed some kitchen and dining room space for the lockers, and Bartos estimates the project added about $7,000 to $10,000 to the renovation. But she considers it money and square footage well spent.

"This was the main built-in, but we knew this would be the one we'd get the most use out of," she says, adding: "I just didn't want to be one of those moms who was stressed about the mess on the floor."

In Potomac, Steve and Mimi Kirstein's three children, ages 7, 9, and 11, used to come home and dump all their gear in the front foyer of their Georgian home. Steve Kirstein says his wife was so weary of the mess she refused to consider decorating their new house until they had solved the organization problem.

"Our kids do a lot of different activities, and the stuff was piling up," says Kirstein, the principal of BOWA builders in McLean, who designed a space with four lockers -- three for the children, and one for himself. (Mimi doesn't need one, her husband says, because "she's neat.")