A Streamlined Approach

New Products Aim to Save Space, Sanity

Forget "be it ever so humble" or "where the heart is."

To hear one architect tell it, home is nothing more than a "warehouse for our stuff."

With that in mind, manufacturers seem to be looking at how to more neatly fit all that stuff into what many of them describe as our increasingly cluttered and unorganized homes.

At the International Builders' Show last week in Orlando, some of the more talked-about products targeted the can't-get-a-handle-on-my-stuff crowd. The show attracted nearly 104,000 builders and other industry folks interested in gawking at the displays of more than 1,900 vendors and hearing experts such as that architect, Victor Mirontschuk of New York.

The offerings went beyond the closet organization systems popularized in recent years. Some manufacturers are reexamining the toilet, the microwave and even the fireplace, looking for ways to make them less bulky, more hidden, and certainly more pleasing to the eye.

Innovation comes at top-of-the-line prices because upscale firms set home product trends, as they do fashion or automobile trends. And the manufacturers that create the most buzz are not necessarily the ones that did the innovating. They may simply be the ones with the bigger marketing budgets or the attention-grabbing add-on features.

There's no telling why people buy so much. Maybe it's just because they can. Maybe it's because they have more disposable income than in the past, because more stores stay open longer or because marketers are savvier at wooing us.

Those are just some of the reasons Donna Smallin, author of several books on organizing, has to offer.

And there may be emotional reasons for the growing need to put all that stuff into some type of order, she said. "We can't control the violence and everything else that's going on around us in the news, but we can organize and clean up our own little corner of the world."

Whatever the reason, it seems to be creating enough demand to capture the attention of big-name brands such as Whirlpool and Kohler. They see consumers looking for ways to save space or create more of it in their homes.

"Organization started out as a chore, then it became an activity and now it's a design principle," said Gayle Butler, editor in chief of Better Homes and Gardens. "It's all about how you like to access the things you use on a day-to-day basis."

Here are ways that some companies propose to help us make better use of the space we have: