Hilary Farr Hates To Overcrowd A Bedroom With This Common Type Of Furniture

HGTV's Hilary Farr has a very specific design aesthetic. She loves to create modern yet elegant spaces that incorporate lots of neutrals, open areas, and classic furniture. She rarely utilizes antiques or follows funky trends. Instead, she prefers the space to be airy and well-utilized, putting a special emphasis on function. That's why she's a pro at flipping cramped, seemingly unsalvageable houses into modern homes with plenty of space — and she does that by tearing down walls, creating open floor plans, and removing furniture that doesn't work. It's also why Farr hates to overcrowd spaces like bedrooms with bulky furniture like dressers or cabinets. They don't offer enough organizational room, and they take up loads of square footage. Instead, she usually removes those pieces and makes closets larger or installs custom built-in closet systems.

You can see this swap time and time again, whether that's on her previous hit show "Love It Or List It" or her new project "Tough Love With Hilary Farr." Time and time again, she swoops into cramped and messy homes, and by removing bulky furniture and creating smarter storage space, she's able to make the room function exponentially better. Here is a closer look into why Farr dislikes bulky dressers, and how you can incorporate her tips into your own home.

Farr believes bulky furniture is a problem because it takes up loads of space. Most people have limited square footage in their bedrooms, so it's difficult to carve out enough storage. Where a dresser can only provide around six drawers and can take up a quarter of the room, an expanded closet or floor-to-ceiling built-in can house everything you need to put away. Her opinion on this has been shared multiple times. For instance, in Season 1, Episode 3 of "Tough Love with Hilary Farr," the HGTV designer renovated a cramped historic home for a military family to make it more functional. The bedroom was stuffed with bulky dressers, making it seem overwhelming. "There is no flow," Farr stated in the episode. Instead, she removed all the dressers and designed a closet along an entire wall. "You can actually share this closet, that's how much space you get," she explained.

Then, in Season 1, Episode 4, Farr butted heads with homeowner Michelle, who had a soft spot for heavy antique cabinets, hutches, and dressers. There were three especially bulky hutches in her bedroom, which looked mismatched and messy. "You have these old pieces of furniture taking up usable space that could solve your storage issues," Farr said in the episode. "The house isn't the problem. The house, filled with all sorts of incongruent, oversized pieces of furniture; that's the problem." She solved it by transforming a quarter of the room into a large walk-in closet.

If you feel like your own bedroom is overrun with heavy furniture pieces, it might be time for a makeover. Take stock of how many pieces you currently have and how much storage room you still need. If there is a massive gap, it might be best to ditch the dressers and instead invest in built-ins. However, creating custom built-ins can cost quite a pretty penny. On average, custom closets cost around $2,100, but that price can be smaller or larger depending on how big the space is and what materials are used. 

If you don't have the funds for that, then a more budget-friendly route is to create built-ins on your own using IKEA PAX hacks. There are tons of hacks online that utilize these closet systems as the foundation for built-ins. TikTok accounts like KLK Interiors show how easy it is to buy PAX wardrobes, install them onto bases, frame them at the ceiling, and turn them into a wall of wardrobes. If you're not skilled with power tools, you can skip creating bases and instead DIY a wall of wardrobes by just standing the PAX closets next to each other, as Claire Appleton on TikTok did.