Married To Real Estate On The Stylish And Functional Way To Hide A Closet

For many, designing and decorating a spare bedroom means balancing function and aesthetics. And unless you have a large house with more rooms than you can use, many spaces must play double duty to meet a homeowner's needs. So while ample storage is a feature you can see in many multifunctional spaces — including most guest rooms — how you utilize space will determine the overall effect. Naturally, too much open shelving and exposed storage spaces can give any room an unkempt appearance. 

On an episode of HGTV's "Married to Real Estate," Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson tackled a combined guest room and home office for one of their clients while trying to boost the property's value, per Realtor. However, the client didn't want the room to look like a bedroom since he would spend his time working there. To address this, Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson devised a clever way to hide the closet so that the office looked nothing like a bedroom. The result is something that homeowners with multifunctional rooms should definitely take note of.

Originally, the space Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson tackled was simply a spare room. However, converting it into a bedroom would help increase property value. According to Clever, a bedroom can add between $30,000 and $50,000 to a home's value. That being said, for a room to legally be considered a bedroom, one of the requirements is that it has a closet. In this case, since the client didn't want his home office to feel like a spare space, the addition of a closet presented a dilemma (per Realtor).

To remedy this, Sherrod created what Jackson calls a "Murphy wall." A full-sized closet is hidden behind a wall of bookshelves that swing open to reveal the closet behind it. "It marries design and function within the space," Sherrod explains. "You know I'm always trying to figure out how to make a room multipurpose."

The built-in bookshelves create a unique feature in the room and also add much-needed storage. Egypt Sherrod writes in the Atlanta Magazine," you can never have too much storage." The shelving displays decorative items but can easily be a place for books and important documents. This creative concealment is a stylish way to make a space function for all needs.