Luxe Laundry Rooms Are Putting a New Spin on an Old Chore

Still doing laundry in a dank basement with a top-loading washer and your mother's favorite detergent? You might as well be slapping your clothes against rocks in a river. Or you might feel that way after getting a load of what's new in the laundry room.

Boxy, neutral-colored washers have given way to highly stylized, energy-efficient front-loading machines. Detergents have more sophisticated packaging and subtler scents. And the laundry room itself, long relegated to the farthest reaches of the cellar, has been elevated in status -- literally. Home builders say most new homes are being built with laundry rooms on first or second floors, and owners of older homes are sacrificing square footage on the upper floors to create more convenient and attractive laundry spaces.

"Even if it's a small space, homeowners would prefer to have it on one of the main living levels," said Sean Degen, vice president of architectural services for Pulte Homes, one of the nation's largest home builders. He said his company had not built a laundry room in the basement of a home in at least 15 years.

Interest in upgrading laundry rooms is still picking up, according to A.J. Riedel, senior partner of Riedel Marketing Group, which forecasts trends in housewares. "It's probably moving up to one of the top spots in terms of home improvement priorities."

"It's not just about making the laundry room prettier," she says. "It's about fixing it up, changing the location, upgrading the appliances. It's a very long-term trend."

Cheryl Mendelson, author of the 1999 housekeeping bible "Home Comforts," is convinced there is enough interest in the subject to devote a new 400-page tome entirely to fabric care: "Laundry" (Scribner, $25) was released in October. "Laundry luxe is what's going on," says Mendelson.

Her follow-up book couldn't be better timed. New products from detergent pellets to innovative ironing boards to drying cabinets aim to make the laundry chores easier. Yet it seems we know less about caring for our clothes than we ever have.

"Ask a 15-year-old whether he or she knows what gingham is, or poplin, or Oxford cloth," Mendelson says. "Or why linen is a summer fabric and wool is a winter fabric." Plenty of adults couldn't tell you either, but the answers matter -- if you want your clothes and linens to last, she says.

The way we suds our duds hasn't changed significantly since the first automatic machines were introduced more than 50 years ago. It is only within the past several years that the laundry room has cleaned up its image and gone upscale.

In the late 1990s, Maytag introduced the Neptune, the first commercially successful front-loading washer in the U.S. market, says Greg Alford, a senior partner at Atlanta-based Peachtree Consulting Group. Such front-loading, high-efficiency machines have a larger capacity (they can accommodate a king-size comforter), are more energy-efficient, save water, and tend to be gentler on clothes because they don't have an agitator.

A few years later, Whirlpool introduced the Family Studio, a high-end laundry room that doubles as a family room, of sorts. Among the amenities were a jetted sink for washing delicates; a drying cabinet for items that needed to lie flat or hang; and a pull-down ironing station. "That really hit the dinger," Alford says. "These are all products they [Whirlpool] dreamed up. The seeds they planted are having an ongoing impact."

The idea that a laundry room could be more than just a place to wash clothes dovetailed with consumer demand for more convenient -- and more accessible -- laundry spaces. According to a 2004 survey by the National Association of Home Builders, 31 percent of home buyers prefer to have a laundry room next to the master bedroom, while 25 percent want it near the kitchen. Seventeen percent of the respondents wanted their laundry rooms in the basement and 10 percent picked the garage.