Closet

When Marcy Loane, sales and marketing coordinator for Bob Ward Homes in Harford County, made a simple but creative floor plan change in the house she bought from her employer, she never expected to start a trend.But the 7-by-14-foot walk-in closet that extends from her master bedroom into space over the garage caught the eye of other homebuyers. Now, customers are asking for the extra storage space in their own homes and the "Marcy" closet has become a popular Bob Ward Homes option."We love our closet," Loane said.

In the past 20 years, the status of the armoire has evolved from exotic to essential, from overscaled white elephant to a staple among household furnishings.This is simply because it's a piece of furniture that actually works. In fact, the armoire has been functioning diligently in Europe since the Middle Ages. Back then it was a kind of locker in which the well-dressed crusader could hang his suit of armor and store his mace, spear, sword and other weapons of righteous warfare.Later, presumably when hand-to-hand combat faded from favor, the armoire assumed more domestic duties, serving as a cabinet for clothes in pre-closet centuries.

All those who are weary of the home-office-in-a-closet concept, please raise your hands. Converting a closet into an at-home office has always been a lame idea. But with distressing frequency and for reasons unknown, it continues to pop up in decorating magazines.Even if there were such a thing as a "spare" closet, who in his right mind would want to spend his work day (week, month, year, career) working in one?Something on the order of 50 million Americans work at home full- or part-time.

Gail Houston, a physician's assistant at Franklin Square Hospital Center, comes by her sense of style quite naturally. Her parents were also sharp dressers and they passed their sartorial sense to 10 daughters and one son. "It's part of the family tradition," she says. Houston, 36, remembers her father working two jobs in St. Louis, Mo., to keep food on the table and his family in nice clothes. Houston remembers rarely donning a hand-me-down.Describe your style.Conservative but cool.For example?

I want to convert a seldom-used guest room into a dressing room. The space has a window and two doors, one of which leads to the bath and the other to our bedroom. Can you give me some pointers on planning the conversion so that the dressing room will be both efficient and attractive?The first step involves a lot of counting and measuring. You'll have to tally up the number of shoes, suits, dresses and so on that are to be stored in the converted space. Then you should calculate the size of those parts of the room that are to be used purely for storage, while keeping in mind the need for ample circulation space.

FINAL FOURFox ValleyAltieri Homes is down to its final four lots at Fox Valley in West Friendship, where the company is building 13 Colonial, traditional or transitional homes with gas heat and hot water.Brick fronts, Corian kitchen counter tops, laundry tubs, six-panel interior doors, full-masonry fireplaces and backup heat pumps are some of the standard features it offers in the Howard County community.Altieri's model at Fox Valley is the Cornell, a 4,000-square-foot Colonial with a base price of $451,990.

When a gas explosion destroyed Shelley Sarsfield's Westminster home last year, the last thing she thought about was her clothes. But when it came time to rebuild, her husband had grand plans for an "explosion gift": a spacious walk-in closet for her impressive wardrobe, most of which amazingly had been spared."

The wallpaper mural of a New England fishing village in Stanley and Hanorah Alseth's living room not only creates a feeling of spaciousness, but it's also a backdrop for conversation with friends and quiet dinners for two by the "harbor."A large mirror, an off-the-floor cabinet and recessed lighting also provide a sense of airiness to the room in their three-story rowhouse in Belair-Edison, a Northeast Baltimore community."It's small, but quite suitable for us," Stanley Alseth, 80, said of the home the couple bought just before their marriage 43 years ago.The mirror and "floating" cabinet in the living room are just a few of the tricks the couple has used to make their home both beautiful and functional.

Attorney Alan Foreman is executive director of the Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association and is also legal counsel for the Maryland Horsemen's Association and the Cloverleaf Standardbred Owners' Association.Horse sense he has. Fashion sense -- he's not so sure.He's the first to admit that his wife Randi is the tasteful mover behind his reputation as a snappy dresser. With the Preakness and its attendant party-week coming up, Foreman knows he will have to pump up his sartorial self.So what are you wearing to the Preakness?

As a teen-ager, Marilyn Blum took her first job for one reason: to buy clothes. Today, she still considers a great wardrobe her reward for working 9 to 5.Although the Social Security Administration manager says her style has grown more sophisticated over the years, she still hunts for bargains like she did when she was a cash-poor kid."Sometimes people who like to shop get a bad rap as being materialistic, but I think dressing is fun," CANDID CLOSETsays Ms. Blum, 46, who lives in Owings Mills.

We recently bought an old house in the country that needs some serious renovations. Among its charms is a large eat-in kitchen with a rustic look that we'd like to retain. There's no attached mud room, but there is a sizable closet right next to the back door that leads directly into the kitchen. Although the closet has a brick floor, it's not in very good condition otherwise. Can you help us decide what to do about storage space for boots, coats and hats? Storage areas such as closets and enclosed cabinets may seem ideal places for stowing all sorts of stuff.

The storage room in Zora Dougherty's consignment shop has been converted into Success in Style's latest fundraiser - Charity's Closet. "I knew I wanted to do something with the space eventually," said Dougherty, owner of Second Childhood in Ellicott City. "At one point, I received services similar to those provided by Success in Style. I knew they could do something great with it." Success in Style, a nonprofit organization, has provided business attire for more than 1,000 low-income women searching for jobs over the past six years.

So this Houston housewife gets a rock from a Tibetan healer and sticks it in a closet, and it starts talking to her - the rock, not the closet - and she doesn't know what to do, but eventually she decides to share its mystical powers with humanity, which is why Tom Kiefaber had the drum session of his life a few weeks back and why the Senator Theatre owner scored a real-deal crystal skull for his theater lobby this weekend, when he screens Indiana Jones...

The sex in Sex and the City? It's clothes porn. It's lusty shopping. It's erotic materialism. It's bags, baubles and stilettos that dangle and shine as enticingly as any aphrodisiac. In the movie that opens Friday, they're not trying to hide it. Consider the money moment in the trailer: "Should we get you a diamond?" Mr. Big asks Carrie, who after longing for Big since the show made its debut in 1998, is finally at the threshold of the marriage she dreamed of. "No," she replies. "Just get me a really big closet."

Part portrait of the artist and part political thriller, Ariel Dorfman's Picasso's Closet -- receiving its world premiere at Washington's Theater J -- is primarily a "what if" play. Dorfman, a playwright exiled from his adopted country of Chile, writes about Pablo Picasso when the Spanish artist was himself in exile, living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II. Though little is known of him during that period, Picasso survived to live another three decades. But what if the artist had been murdered by the Nazis in 1944?

You know a lion when you see one. A witch, while she may take a little longer to spot, is something most of us can recognize as well. But a wardrobe? If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, if you're not into antiques and have never needed to supplement your closet space, you might not be familiar with the piece of furniture that stars in the new movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the first in the series of C.S. Lewis children's books.

The other night I gave three short doorbell blasts at my old family Guilford Avenue home. Soon my two twin nieces, Mary and Katie, were working the locks to admit their uncle, whom they informed was late for dinner. I was. I had missed a bus. My sister Ann ushered me into the kitchen and offered a chair at the table. As she put it, it was Pop's chair, meaning the seat and place normally reserved for my grandfather, Edward Jacques Monaghan Sr., who died in 1963. After all these years, it's still Pop's chair, except for the days when Father Al Mack, a Jesuit priest, occasionally visited and took the honored seat.

Jackie Walker has been conducting style seminars all across the country for 15 years, and the audience reaction is always the same: "The women crowd around me afterward," she says. "They ask, 'Do you have a book? I want to take this information home with me.' " Now, at last, the wardrobe guru does have a book: I Don't Have a Thing to Wear: The Psychology of Your Closet (Pocket Books, $12). It is co-authored by Judie Taggart, a fashion writer. "My mission is to give women self-esteem.

Reorganizing any size or shape closet is a pretty simple procedure, thanks to specially designed shelving and cabinets available at hardware stores and home centers. These organizing products, geared toward helping the do-it-yourselfer remake and reorganize laundry rooms, mud rooms, garages and basements, come in a variety of sizes and price ranges. Using a few common tools and working around any budget, it takes but a few hours to transform a closet. Two types of closet organizers dominate the do-it-yourself market: ready-to-assemble, melamine-coated cabinets and shelving, and coated-wire organizers.

THE SHOTGUN in my house rests unloaded in a closet where the grandkids can't get at it when they visit. It, or a weapon like it, has been around for more than 16 years. I got the shotgun when I lived in the 4100 block of Pimlico Road. Things were fine at first, but when drug dealers and addicts took over a nearby corner, they started the annoying habit of camping out on the steps and porches of neighborhood folks who worked for a living. We put in eight-, 10- or 14-hour days, only to arrive home and have to ask some lout to vacate our premises.