A professional organizer’s guide to selecting furniture that flows with your home + needs.

After 3+ years of helping people tidy up their homes and declutter their lives, I’ve come across a variety of dressers. What I’ve gathered from this experience is that people often buy furniture, particularly dressers + storage, without truly pausing to consider what they need and want from their purchase. I’ve worked with dressers that were way too small to hold everything the client needed to store. Some dressers have all the wrong size drawers for the intended contents. Many, and this is a big pet peeve of mine, have drawers that don’t open all the way! If you’re picturing me tearing my hair out when I encounter these drawers, you’re correct.

If you need a dresser for a purely decorative, non-storage purpose, then those ridiculous drawers will be just fine. If you actually need to use a dresser for storage, I’ve unleashed my particular nature and years of observing dressers in the wild to help you shop for a new dresser that is actually functional! Along the way, you may pick up on a theme I bring to all aspects of my work in homes: pause to consider your self + your needs. It’s all too easy to create a home environment that doesn’t take our true preferences, needs, and dreams into account – storage solutions included! I hope this deep dive into dresser shopping will help you make a choice that works for your space and your needs! Let’s get to it.

WHAT KINDS OF ITEMS DO YOU NEED TO YOU STORE?

First question to ask yourself is what do you need this storage for? It is surprisingly easy to decide you need to buy a dresser without ever considering exactly what will go inside. Are you storing clothing? Board games? Placemats? Craft supplies? Collectible comic books? All of these examples have very different dimensions and take up space differently. As such, they require very different sizes of drawers!

If you know you’ll be storing clothing in the dresser, what type of clothing will you be storing? Thick bulky sweaters? Socks that fold up small? Different clothing does best in different size drawers too! Do you also have some clothing to store that would be better hung up, but you don’t have a closet? If so, consider a wardrobe or armoire – essentially a free-standing closet with a rod for hanging clothes that usually also has drawers for storing folded items too.

If you can’t come up with a good idea of what you’ll store in there, do you actually need a dresser for storage? Sometimes we think we need a dresser without realizing our storage needs are actually already met! Many of us grew up using a dresser of some kind, so it feels like a necessary part of a bedroom setup to purchase one. Or if you’ve only lived in old homes or apartments without closets, a dresser is crucial! Maybe you have a walk-in closet now, making a dresser unnecessary.

WHAT QUANTITY OF EACH KIND OF ITEM DO YOU NEED TO STORE?

With this question and the last, we’re essentially space planning. If you live in say, Chicago, you might need more tall drawers for all the bulky sweaters you own to get through the winter. If instead you live in Florida, maybe you need more short drawers to store your collection of bikinis and tank tops. I highly suggest putting all of the items you’d like to store in your dresser on your bed/kitchen table/floor, fold the items that would be folded, group like items together, and count them by category of item. For clothes, how many pairs of underwear? Socks? Jeans? Hoodies? Get a sense of how much space each group of items takes up. This will help dictate how many drawers you need and what size the drawers need to be.

Of course, you may have too many items in one category to fit into a single drawer. That’s ok! Incorporate multiple drawers next to each other into your ideal dresser plan. The important thing with this exercise is to understand about how many drawers you’ll need and of what sizes.

ARE YOU SHARING THE DRESSER?

Is there sufficient space in one dresser for each of you, or would having your own, separate dressers be better? I run into this most often with my clients who are couples. So many times, I’ve heard one partner complain that they went out and bought a new dresser to share, only for one of them to be squeezed out of it by the other partner. Sometimes this problem is remedied when we complete the Clothing category together and pare down both parter’s items to what will actually fit in their storage space. Sometimes, they just bought a dresser that’s too small!

Just like you did with your own things, take stock of the kinds and quantities of items the other person/people will be storing in the dresser. Make sure you can realistically and comfortably fit all of your combined items together. If not, it may be time to find a different solution.

If you’re hunting down a dresser that will be shared by multiple children, you’ll definitely want to ensure each child can have their own designated drawers. This will make it easier for the kids to dress themselves and will help keep things straightforward when laundry is put away. Having a designated space per child keeps the hand-me-down process smooth and makes it easier to identify what clothing needs to be donated because it no longer fits.

Location + Use

HOW WILL YOUR NEW DRESSER FLOW WITH YOUR SPACE?

If you chose all your new furniture solely based on how great each individual piece is, chances are they won’t work well together in your home. Have you ever bought a new dining table only to realize you can barely fit your existing dining chairs under it? These frustrating “almost works” furniture mishaps can be avoided by taking a sec to think about the other items in your home.

“Consider how it will flow with your space”

WHERE WILL YOU PUT YOUR NEW DRESSER?

No matter where you put the dresser in your home, take into account the amount of space needed to be able to actually open the drawers. You don’t want to finally get your dream dresser delivered only to find that opening the drawers bangs them into a doorframe, dining chairs, or some other unforeseen obstruction.

If you’re hoping for the dresser to sit under a window, make sure it’s the right height to sit entirely underneath the window, including any trim. Check that the dresser you put there isn’t so deep that you can’t reach over it to actually open the window!

If you’re planning on buying a dresser/hutch/some other name for a freestanding set of drawer storage for your kitchen, you may want a dresser with feet so you can easily clean under it. A dresser that sits flush against the floor could trap all the crumbs and add unnecessary minor annoyance when you’re sweeping up each evening.

Does the dresser need to double as a TV stand? In that case, check the back to make sure it will work with your cable wire needs.

HOW WILL YOU USE IT BEYOND STORAGE?

Tiny baby, tiny clothes! This client was expecting her first child + needed help setting up the nursery.

If you’re planning to use smaller dressers as nightstands, consider again what you’ll wind up storing in there. Do you intend to dedicate all of the drawers to your clothing, or will you inevitably wish you’d left room for your sleep mask and bedtime reading in the top drawer?

For a dresser in a nursery, you may want a dresser that is a comfortable height to double as a changing table so you an avoid having two big pieces of furniture in the room. Choose drawers that are an appropriate size and depth for tiny baby clothes, as well as diapers and diaper cream.

Drawers

Quick note on dimensions of drawers: I use the term “depth” to refer to the inside measurement from the front or face of the drawer all the way to the back of the drawer. “Height” refers to the measurement from the inside bottom of the drawer to the top. “Width” is the side to side measurement of the inside of the drawer.

WHAT DRAWER DEPTH IS BEST?

Can you see all of the inside of the drawer when it’s open? One of my biggest pet peeves is when a dresser drawer only halfway comes out, leaving half of the inside of the drawer covered up by the actual dresser! I ask you, what is the use of all that space we can’t see?? While this is only slightly less of an issue if you stack your folded clothes (which I strongly discourage), deep drawers that don’t slide out all the way leave as much as half of your file-folded clothes hidden in the dark. These kinds of dresser drawers are frustrating to use and actually encourage clutter and overbuying. Storage is only functional when you can easily see what is inside your storage container. Covering things up in stacks (hello, folded t-shirt towers) and obstructing them with drawers that don’t open fully are two ways to make sure you forget about what you own. If you can’t see it, you won’t use it. If you have to take four things out to get to one other item, that encourages mess as we often neglect to then put those other four things back.

“If you can’t see it, you won’t use it.”

WHAT DRAWER HEIGHT IS BEST?

Depending on what you’re storing, you may want drawers of varying heights or you may want all of your drawers to be the same height. For clothing, I recommend a variety of drawer heights. Socks and underwear do better in shorter drawers since they fold up small and don’t take up much space. File-folded jeans are taller than socks, so they take up more vertical space and need taller drawers. I encourage my clients to store their small clothes in their top drawers and work their way down as they get dressed. An average dresser I organize often ends up with socks/underwear in the top drawers, tops in the middle, and bottoms (pants + shorts) in the bottom drawers.

WHAT DRAWER WIDTH IS BEST?

Fellow plus-size people, hear me – our file-folded clothes take up more space width-wise in a standard drawer than a straight-sized person’s clothing does. Consider this when shopping for a dresser so you can make sure to get one roomy enough for your clothing. Of course, we can make extra folds when folding our clothing to get it down to a similar size, but that’s often frustrating and can discourage us from actually folding our clothing. Wider drawers will make putting your clothing away a much more pleasant experience!

This same principle is applied to everything you plan to store in a drawer. Make sure it fits in whatever dresser drawers you buy If you want to store placemats in a new set of drawers in the kitchen, measure them to make sure they will actually fit

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that you’ve figured out the drawer measurements that best suit your needs, tally up how many skinny, medium size, and deep drawers you need in your dresser. Or, if you want drawers that are all the same size, how many drawers do you need? Limit your search to dressers that work with your drawer requirements.

“Storage is only functional when you can easily see what’s inside.”

Size + Shape

Arguably the most important step in selecting, well, any furniture for your home is measuring!

BIG OR SMALL

Before you pull out the measuring tape, consider the relative size of the furniture you already have in the room. It helps aesthetically to keep your furniture proportional. If you have lots of smaller furniture and come home with a massive dresser, it could feel a bit strange in comparison and never feel like it belongs in the space.

“Before you pull out the measuring tape, consider the relative size of all the furniture you already have in the room”

The same can be said for the size of the room. Small furniture in a big, open room looks weird, as does huge furniture in a tiny room. If your furniture takes up too much space in a room, you lose that spacious, expansive feeling so many of us are looking for in our homes. Furniture that’s too big for the room will often make a spotless room feel cluttered and clunky, undoing all of your efforts to keep things tidy and flowing.

MEASURE!

Measure the space where you want your dresser to go. Sometimes it helps to take the measurements twice to check yourself! Use this initial measurement to help you get a sense of what might be too big or too small in the space. Come up with some general measurements you feel good about and use those to filter your online searches to make things easier on yourself. If shopping in person, take your measuring tape to the store and check any dressers that catch your eye against the measurements you took at home.

Once you have a specific piece in mind, map out the measurements of that dresser in your room before purchasing You can use painters or masking tape to mark the actual footprint of the dresser on the floor where you’d like it to be and along the wall to show the height. As silly as it may sound, pretend like you’re actually using the dresser to get a sense of how you like those dimensions. Maybe you’ll realize you would actually prefer a taller dresser, or one that is a bit more shallow.

TALL OR LOW

“Dresser” is a bit of an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of different styles of sets of drawers. Chests of drawers aka tallboys are, well, tall! The drawers are stacked on top of each other for a vertically oriented dresser versus a lower one where the drawers are in a few rows, but stacked side by side in multiple columns. The measurements you take and your answers to all of the above questions will help you determine whether you need a taller or lower dresser.

Color, Material, + Style

KEEP THE FLOW…OR DON’T!

You’ll know far better than me which colors, materials, and styles work best for your particular home. Intentional clashing is an excellent design tool, but not one we all have an eye for. If your goal is to create a space that feels calm, tidy, and relaxing, play it safe by opting for colors, materials, and styles that flow well with what you already have. Keep your wood tones similar, match your metals, and consider whether you want your all white living room to suddenly have a bright green dresser. That bright green dresser might look absolutely amazing, but it’s a departure from a monochrome space that needs to be an intentional choice instead of an unintended disappointment. If you’re looking for that particular shift, go for it!!

TRUST A PRO

If, like me, you’re easily overwhelmed with options when it comes to design, lean on someone with an eye you trust! For me, that person is my youngest sister who is an illustrator and stylist. For you, it might mean hiring a professional. The internet has made hiring an interior designer so much more accessible and affordable. Plenty of online interior designers are out there, ready to help you design your space, selecting items from stores like Target that work with your budget.

DIY IT!

Don’t be afraid to DIY your dresser. Swapping out old hardware for something you like better will utterly transform a piece of furniture. You can take a cheap IKEA dresser and put some Anthropologie knobs on it for a unique look that elevates your room. Same goes for the feet! There are a few companies out there that sell dresser feet specifically for Ikea furniture that could also be used with just about any non-Swedish dresser. Explore your options. If you’re really handy and motivated, one of the most fun and gratifying projects I’ve ever done was to strip, sand, and re-stain an old desk. It took some time, but knowing I’d created something beautiful and totally unique all on my own made that desk so much more joyful to use and see every day.

Quality + Budget

Whether you’re working with an interior designer on a $100k budget or making the rounds at your favorite thrift stores and resale sites, bringing home the wrong dresser is a drain. I’ve worked with clients in multi-million dollar homes with beautiful dressers that were just not functional for their intended use. These dressers actually encourage clutter!

Thrift stores, antique stores, yard sales, and estate sales are all excellent options for finding unique, quality dressers. Same goes for virtual options like Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, and Nextdoor. Online sellers usually post the measurements for furniture they are trying to sell so you can make sure your time is well spent shopping for a piece that will actually work in your home.

Solid wood is usually a safe bet for a quality dresser that will last. That said, I’ve had secondhand Ikea particle board dressers I used for many years before reselling myself! Take some time to really check the reviews, especially the ones with photos. I’ve found dressers online that looked perfect for my needs, only to see in the review photos that none of the drawers actually sit straight and the wood arrives gouged. Online shopping has given us so much more information, which is both a blessing and a curse. Sifting through all the info can be a slog, but it’s worth it if you’re investing in a big piece of furniture that you’ll have to look at every day!