Hung Up, or, the coat rack saga you never knew you were missing

My apartment's pretty starved for space, in case you haven't picked up on that already. I love how cosy it is, but sometimes I wish it were a little more roomy. It has forced me to become pretty creative, however, when seeking solutions.

One recent AT Cure task was to create a landing strip. For most people, this meant dressing up their hallway a bit - moving in a coat rack, cleaning off their console table and creating a space to throw their keys and stash their mail on said console. Something like this spread from Blueprint ... all right, and this photo from another article:



I have pined for a console table ever since seeing it.

Unfortunately, I don't have a hallway. You open my front door and wham! my whole apartment is laid out before you. Pretty anticlimactic, but at least there are no surprises. The console table is just a pipe dream - you could maybe fit a narrow end table in the space between my bookshelf and the door, but I'd rather not squeeze things into spaces simply because they're there. The idea is open and airy, not cluttered and closed.

So...I drop my keys and the junk mail on the vintage hors d'oeuvres tray on my coffee table and dump my fifty-ton bag on the floor when I come in at the end of the day. It works OK - when the tray starts to tip to one side I know it's time to begin shredding.

Winter is approaching, however. And while my coats are still hanging out at my parent's house, I have a feeling they're going to be useful soon (this is Chicago, after all) and I really need someplace to hang them. I've been looking for the perfect coat hook rack for weeks now - something attractive, reasonably inexpensive ($20 and under, hopefully), as well as utilitarian. My idea was to find an overdoor model - I'd rather hang art on my dwindling wall space - but it seems that cute overdoor coat racks are few and far between. I'll spare you the trouble but let's just say they vary from ugly to uglier to ugliest.

I finally came across this Umbra model.



I loved the sleek design and hated the stainless steel - it's so cold looking. I'm one of those annoying people who ponder a purchase for weeks at a time - weeks that I could have spent enjoying it if I had just made up my mind - the bonus being that I almost never regret a purchase. So I vacillated back and forth over it, some days thinking I could just spray paint it red and it would be perfect, other days wondering why I should go through the effort and risk an ugly paint job.

Luckily, the problem seems to have solved itself. I had pretty much given up on my hunt for the perfect overdoor rack when I found (stumbled over, rather) this cool customer by Spectrum. It's exactly what I was looking for. It has interesting details: I love the wooden balls at the end that remind me of the iconic Eames coat rack. It's minimal yet fun. And, with shipping, the total is just over $22. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!