What’s your mid-century storage style?

17 min readBefore you try to start solving any storage problem, I’m going to recommend that you set your storage style. Because of course I am!

Planning new storage solutions might be part of your remodel. But planning some storage improvements does not have to mean taking on a whole remodel. Storage is a great place to make smaller targeted updates as part of your mid-century remodel master plan. DIY-ing a small storage niche or a buying a new piece of storage furniture can easily be a weekend project. 

Your storage style is probably aligned with your mid-century style. Which you may already know if you’ve taken my style quiz. (If you haven’t, click that link and take it now!)

Knowing your storage style will help you decide between open or closed storage, choose vintage or modern pieces or details, and figure out which wood grain and tone will work in your home.

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Being prepared to make these choices upfront allows you to rinse and repeat your way to a house filled with coordinated custom built-ins or helps you hunt down a nicely matching set of vintage furniture to solve your problems instead.

Whether you lean vintage or modern, storage gives you an opportunity to create a cohesive feel through your home. Adding built-ins in a few key places around your house, can yield both better functionality and a “tied-together” feeling of design intention throughout your home.

In an original mid-century home that is at least a notch or two above builder grade, wood elements are often primary features. Hardwood floors, slat walls, paneling and built-ins are often included beyond the kitchen and bathroom. You may have a cute built-in room divider/shelf or built-in dining room storage. Most mid-century modest home have the wood floors and trim, maybe even some paneling, but are often missing those additional features.  

If you lean toward the vintage side, trying to preserve or recreate mid-century original storage solutions is eminently possible. And recreations don’t need to be fancy or expensive. Original mid-century built-ins were often very simple – stained single pieces of wood on metal brackets or simple box frames with partial overlay doors.

Because these pieces were often site-built by local builders or DIY-ed by homeowners using guides from publications like Better Homes & Gardens or Mario Dal Fabbro’s classic book, How to Make Built-In Furniture, they carry an approachable, hands-on charm. And even a novice level DIY-er can build them using those same guides.  

Not a builder? You can hunt down authentic mid-century furniture on social sites, thrift stores or architectural salvage warehouses. 

But what if your style leans a little more modern or mid mod fusion? Storage is a great place to add updated elements to a mid-century house. Whether you are planning to work with a high-end custom cabinet shop or choose a flat-pack system (like IKEA with custom doors from Semihandmade or Plykea), you’ll have a different set of choices. You’ll need to decide on frame style, door style and materials. And I actually covered those choices in Episode 2111. Whether you are choosing kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, mudroom, or basement storage the options are the same…and so are the answers. 

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Planning new storage solutions for your house doesn’t have to mean a whole remodel. You don’t need to do them all at once either. A little storage niche can be an eminently weekend DIY type project. But before you solve a storage problem, you need to set your storage style. Open or closed, vintage or modern, wood grain or painted. 

Make these choices up front, and then you can rinse and repeat your way to a beautiful house filled with coordinated custom built-ins, or just hunt down a nicely matching, but not actually originally matching, set of vintage furniture to solve your problems instead. 

Today we’re going to talk about the pros and cons of a more vintage preservation style of built-ins or a more modern update style of built-ins that either way should play nicely with any material finishes that already exist in your house. 

Hey there, welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2603. 

Before we get into today’s topic, I want to remind you that now is absolutely the right time to get in touch if you are hoping to take on remodel work in 2027. If you want to get it done, or frankly, even really a medium-sized project started next year, we want to start your design process, ASAP. 

And Mid Mod Midwest is already booking out into design starts in 2027. But our process will begin with a conversation. You and I talking about what’s important to you, what’s going on with your house, what worries or roadblocks you’re experiencing, and what matters most to you in your upcoming plans. 

That kind of conversation, we should get it on the books in December. So pop on over to midmod-midwest.com slash work with us to get yourself a time on our calendar so you and I can have that first talk. Okay, uh, what else do I need to remind you of before we dive in on our topic? You’ll probably find it handy to go look at visual examples of the things I’m talking about today, and you can find some of them on our show notes page. 

But also I’ve got a whole guide to mid-century storage solutions, which links out to past episodes, to decluttering advice, to um resources, and to our Pinterest board that I’m continuing to kind of fill in with more specific storage solutions for each of the episodes as I record them. Grab that from the show notes page at midmodest.com/2603. 

Okay. So no matter what, whether you are leaning vintage or leaning modern for the style of your entire house, which should be related to the style of your storage, you want one thing more than anything else, which is consistency. And if you’re going to spring for storage built-in solutions in a few key places around your house, you get not just better places to put away your things and easier access to the objects of your daily life, but a cohesive, tied together feeling of design intention throughout the house. 

In an original mid-century house that was, you know, built above the builder grade, or frankly, even in a builder grade house, you’ll find a commonality, not just in the kitchen and bathroom. You’re gonna find wood grain specifically all over the place. Hardwood floors, wood post and beam structure in some cases, slat walls, wooden panels, and certainly uh wood built-ins in many more places than just kitchen and bathroom. 

You’ll find them in the living room, you’ll find them in the basement, you’ll find them in bedrooms, the trim on the house doors and the doors themselves will probably match or coordinate with the built-ins that you’ll find throughout. As we remodel, as we add layers and layers of detail to a house, that consistency can break down a little bit. 

And one of the big failings of if you sort of are scanning through Zillow and looking at a house, sometimes you’ll see a wipe slate clean flip where everything is painted white and everything has been replaced with sort of cheap Home Depot whatnot. But more often than that, even you’ll just see a bunch of different remodeling projects from a bunch of different eras that don’t really seem to be speaking to each other anymore. 

Now, no matter where you’re starting from, whether you’ve got a time capsule house that you now would like to modernize, but you don’t want your new kitchen, for example, to feel completely foreign to the rest of the house, it could be a really nice easing of that transition to keep some time capsule elements of the house. You don’t need to go through and change every piece of hardware or every swing door in the house. 

But if you put a few of your new built-ins in not just the kitchen, but also in a prominent bathroom, in the living room, at the entryway, you can start to create um a bilingual house, if you will, in terms of style languages that it’s speaking. You’ve got the vintage pieces and you want the new pieces to feel friendly to the old ones, but you can create consistency among all of the new pieces. 

Or conversely, if you’re dealing with a house that has been totally whited out, you’re adding back mid-century vintage or mid-century update adjacent details throughout the house. Again, you want that to appear in more than one spot. So even if what you’re primarily considering is a new kitchen, a new bathroom, you still want to have these things pop out in other places. 

This kind of throws back to the conversation I had with Nathan Hartman, the founder of Kerf Kitchens. If you are not familiar with Kerf Kitchens, there are beautiful end-grain, visible plywood specifically kitchens, but also built-ins for a bunch of different parts of houses. And that was, what would that have been? Episode uh 2308 back in February. If you missed it, it’s a great listen. 

Um, but if you heard it and you are just remembering, one of the things he talked about is that when they do a kitchen for a house, they often bring in just a couple of other places. You know, if you can see the living room from a relatively open planned kitchen, they might also do the entertainment center. Uh, they might do something at the entry of the house. So you don’t sort of come into the house experiencing one design language and then boom, you walk into the kitchen and something else completely different is happening. 

You feel the anticipation, you’re already seeing the pieces of the new kerf design layered into the house in multiple places. All right. So the topic for today’s episode is the vintage versus the modern and how these pieces kind of go together. Uh, and I’ve talked about this before, but I think in the specifically context of focusing on a season of storage solutions, a season of built-ins, if you will, that distinction is going to be really important. 

If you lean towards the vintage, if you’re trying to preserve and expand upon your mid-century original storage solutions, the most important thing, or if you’re trying to rebuild them from scratch, if you’re trying to recreate them in a sort of a preservationist manner, the most important thing to remember is that it does not need to be fancy or expensive. Often these are very simple. It’s a stained single piece of wood shelf on a metal bracket mounted on one of those vertical tack strips put onto the wall. Or it is a very simple box frame with partial overlay door. 

The trade-off, though, in a relatively simple vintage style, is that it is more highly crafted, might require more of your effort because it’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to be able to get from every cabinet shop. It’s certainly not the thing sort of thing you’re going to be able to get from your big box store. But that at the same time means it, even though it’s a thing that you kind of need to DIY, it is a thing you can DIY. 

And frankly, to do it yourself, to build it yourself, was part of the philosophy of these original homes. They usually came with a kitchen and with a bathroom built in, but often with an unfinished basement, or the idea that you would add on a rec room in addition off the back of the house. And that might be done by a builder locally, or it might be finished out by the owner of the home. But if you look at the publications from the day, the uh the Better Homes and Gardens, or the Popular Mechanics, there are all of these how-to manual advice pieces talking you through the process of creating your own built-ins. 

And there is absolutely nothing stopping us from taking that on for ourselves today. When I’m trying to identify the era of a built-in, there are a couple of signs that talk to me about it being an early mid-century, a mid-mid-century, or an 80s remodel, 90s remodel kind of a kitchen. I was just on site doing a field measure and site visit for a new master plan client earlier this week, and we were trying to determine without any permit data the build date of various built-ins throughout the house. 

The kitchen, we decided was almost certainly an 80s remodel. I kitchens are a little bit harder to date given style language, so it could have, could have even tipped into the 90s or it could have been 70s, but when we went into the bathroom, I was pretty sure the kitchen and bathroom were done at the same time. The bathroom was 80s as all. Get out, right down to the sort of beige uh tile, grouted tile countertop. Yikes. 

Um, but one thing, even though the cabinet doors were a partial overlay with an exposed hinge, which could even be a 60s style, the drawers had uh metal track roller pullouts. And that kind of hardware was not as common in the mid-century era. We went into the basement, and the basement entertainment center struck me as much more likely to be either original to the house or part of a first pass finished the basement project undertaken by the original owners before the end of the 1960s. 

And I could see when I opened up again, the drawers are kind of your telltale. A modern cabinet drawer is probably wrapped MDF or a sort of a or either wrapped in white o

r wrapped in a light sort of pine-ish finish. Um, but it’s multi-density, medium density fiberboard underneath. Um for a more 80s vintage, you’re probably gonna see uh a plywood or a solid wood door uh drawer sort of side panel, but it will be on a metal slider. 

Um for the 60s one, it was a relatively simple box frame drawer, but there was there was squeaking. I could hear metal on metal squeaking. So there was some kind of, it wasn’t a roller device, but it was like there was some kind of metal underneath it. And then for a 1950s door, uh drawer in a 1952 house, it’s just a wooden box jammed in a wooden hole. But like that’s that’s the drawer hardware. This is one of the reasons it becomes a little hard to pull them in and out. They don’t soft close, Lord knows. Um, and it’s one of the reasons people end up replacing mid-century built-ins because the drawers are kind of sticky. 

But anyway, um one of my favorite references for the kind of partial DIY nature, even though it may have been built by the homeowner or it may have been built by go by site built by a local builder, it was probably not built in a cabinet shop. If you’re looking with a 1950s built-in install for storage in your kitchen, in your bathroom, in your entertainment unit, anywhere, um, is this lovely book, How to Make Built-in Furniture by Mario Dal Fabbro. My personal copy, ironically, although the book was originally pug published in 1952, 1955, I beg your pardon. Um, my copy was published in Great Britain in 1962, a repr a reprint. Um, and was in the Kincardineshire County Library. Angus and Kincardineshire. I’m probably not pronouncing that right. 

Um, anyway, and then it made its way to me through modern book reselling properties. But you can find resale copies of this book. You can also find a scanned version of it online, I believe, in the USmodernist.org archive. I’ll look that up and see if I can find you a link to it. But in the foreword, Mario Dal Fabbro himself writes, Built-in furniture is becoming more and more the mark of a modern interior. The old method of dividing the living area by wall partitions is gradually giving way to the practice of leaving the area open and permitting the occupant to adapt the space to his own needs in accordance with his own taste. 

Thanks to built-ins, a room can have its own individual design, free of the monotonous uniformity of mass production furniture. Um it’s funny that they think that buying furniture is not putting personality into your house, but building built-ins is. Anyway, aside from these aesthetic considerations, built-ins can achieve real space economies by either utilizing wall recesses, attics, or the space beneath a sloping ceiling, or by making full use of a wall area from the floor to the ceiling and side to side. 

And then this book goes on to contain pretty helpful introduction to measuring, to purchasing wood, to finishing, to hardware, to anchoring and installing pieces, and then designs for bookshelves, for a bunch of different configurations, for desks, for radio cabinets, for wall-hung storage units, for radiator enclosures, for serving hatch from the kitchen to the living room, for a telephone shelf, built-in benches you can sit on, breakfast bars, um, a bunch of different ways to cleverly add storage to your attic, to your basement, to your garage, and eventually like an entire kitchen, um, island breakfast bar, storage wall, and bath cabinets. 

So you could you could do the built-in furniture for an entire house from the pages of this book, and it’s it’s beautiful, clear, lovely illustrations. I’ll put a couple of photos of it on the the show notes page. The thing that you will see over and over and over again in these vintage styles is um simple pieces of wood. It’s plywood and it is um lumberyard boards, it is exposing edges, there’s very little sort of decorative trim, um, it’s very simple construction, there’s not a lot of complicated hardware necessary, it’s just screws and cleats and hinges, uh, and it’s it’s very basic. 

Now, if you’re starting from scratch, if you’re building new built-in storage for your mid-century house, kind of whether you’re going vintage or mid-century in style, there’s a lot more commonality between a low, a low-cost DIY version and a high super custom solution than there is of the middle ground. Um, because mid-century original cabinets were often site-built by the contractor who built the rest of the house, not built, as I said, in a shop with boxes installed in the house as separate units, the way cabinets are now. 

And what that means is that while a high-end or just a philosophically creative custom cabinet shop can match you detail for detail on some of the things you’ll find in your mid-century original house or in someone else’s, if you’re going for a more price-conscious middle-of-the-line supplier that starts from pre-made box units, like you would find at a big box store, or flat pack like you’d find at IKEA. That system is going to depend more on predetermined regular units and have less room for creative flexibility for clever storage niches into that last available inch of space, as Mario Dal Fabbro was talking about, of like getting into the cavities of the house. 

They’re going to be a little bit more stack along the edges of the space. Now, this is not the end of the world. There is plenty of good design to be found in flat pack IKEA kitchens. Um, IKEA themselves has a nice line of walnut doors, or you can go with a semi-custom door and drawer replacement, like the kind supplied by uh semi-handmade or plaikia. It does mean that if you’re not willing or able with your own skill and available time to follow the advice in a mid-century built-in design guide, or to get a truly custom mid-century uh anchored built-in setup done by a high-end custom cabinet shop, you are going to be doing something a little bit more regular looking, a little bit more a little bit more related to the style of the person that’s selling it to you, and a little bit less related to the style of your house. 

One way or another, you will recognize that you’re being shown something, or you get to choose between options that are going to go towards the cabinet box type, which basically means does it or doesn’t it not have a face frame? You can have a European style or a traditional style. The European is just the edges of something. A traditional is the four outside edges of something, and then a front piece with a hole in it that then has a door or a drawer over it. And this will definitely affect how sort of tied in, how built-in the built-ins feel. Or I suppose you can have no framing whatsoever. You can just have shelves mounted on a wall, and that is also, if done right, a classic mid-century style. Um, either can be correct for mid-century style, the European or the traditional. Similarly, you’ve got options for door type. 

If you’re going full vintage, you’re gonna choose a partial overlay door with like a browdered curved edge, not a curve in the, it won’t, this will still be a rectangle, but the edge profile of the door will be lightly curved. Uh for a much more modern, much more contemporary look, you’ll go with a full overlay door. That’s just a simple, each door and drawer front is a full square-edged uh prism. And then you’re gonna be thinking about what is it made of? Are you looking at wood grain? What is the veneer type? Again, for all of this, I’m gonna point you towards an episode I’ve done in the past on mid-century kitchen cabinets, but this applies to all of your built-ins everywhere. And that is episode uh, let’s see, 2111 from June of 2025. 

Now, what are your storage options if you are not solving your storage problems with built-ins? I said in the very first episode of this season that you don’t have to have built-ins to solve storage problems, and you don’t. Um, this is where I have so much more affection for the simple builder grade storage solutions or the cheap furniture solutions of the mid-century era than I do for the less expensive and easier to access storage solutions of today. 

Back in the mid-century, it was pretty easy to go to the lumber yard and get some of those triangular shelf brackets with little vertical mounting strips and some astonishingly dense grained, high-quality random board lumber and fill one of those blank empty closets with very effective storage or line your basement with very effective storage. There is still nothing stopping us from doing that today. The boards are a little more fast growth, a little less densely grained, but those triangular mounting clips and brackets are still around. 

But today, much more often when we need storage, I think it’s the default to assume we’ll just run down to Target and grab one of those flat pack knock-together little cheap storage six square, eight square opening MDF stacking storage unit things. Um, maybe a collection of brightly colored fabric boxes to put your objects into. And there’s nothing wrong with that conceptually, but what it actually means is you’re bringing a whole bunch of wood glue and formaldehyde or similarly disgusting off-gassing chemicals into your home. 

And those little flat pack units made out of MDF are heavy as hell, hard to repurpose, and rapidly go from looking relatively fresh and tidy to pretty beat up, dirt, dirty, and cheap. They’re not repairable, they’re not reusable, and for anyone who’s ever depended on them in an apartment life through several moves, know that they do not survive more than two moves before they get wobbly and never stop wobbling. In my opinion, therefore, a far more successful approach to furniture solutions for your mid-century storage would be to go hunting on Facebook Marketplace for an authentic piece of mid-century furniture, which, yeah, might have a little plywood in it, but no MDF. That’s medium density fiberboard if you’re not familiar. And it will survive many moves and be pretty with its veneer covering while it stores your stuff in drawers. 

Um speaking of, though, those uh triangle bracket and shelf versions, uh, one piece of advice I have if you are paying attention to your neighborhood, if you ever see a neighbor cleaning out their old basement storage shelves or something else and dumping a bunch of old wood on the curb for trash, pick it up, take it home. That is good, solid, strong wood. You will not find in the same quality at the same species at a lumber yard today. Best quality you can find without demolishing a Victorian house, basically.

I know I just did an episode on decluttering, and you know what? In it, I confess that I am a hoarder of potential project supplies, but I am strongly gonna recommend that if you ever see anybody trying to put into a landfill simple pine storage shelves from the 1950s or 60s, uh that stuff is practically bomb blast proof and you should salvage it. Okay. 

So whether you choose to try to match or at least coordinate as much as possible with uh any vintage original built-ins in your house, or whether you choose to distinctly make a difference, to do something clearly modern, like for example, apply Kia kitchen and apply Kia entry storage unit and apply Kia um bathroom, and then the rest of your house has its original mid-century doors and a few built-in walls, shelves, and things. That can be a lovely contrast. 

There is not a right or a wrong way to do this. There are pros and cons to both approaches, and I think it’s just gonna end up depending mostly on your style guide. If you have not yet done the work to set up your style guide for your whole house remodel, then I recommend A that you take a mid-century master plan whole house approach to this process, or at least B, you run yourself through the style guide system. 

I’ve got a very affordably priced class that walks you through that process within sort of a two-hour time window that you can find on my courses page. I’ll link to that in the show notes. It’s the more than a mood board course because you need more than just a mood board to really plan an excellent remodel. And I know that you can. Um, but yeah, setting up the style guide, knowing what kind of wood grain or paint, painted wood can be possible, but I would recommend wood grain for your new storage solution built-ins, or that you’re going to be hunting down. 

If you’re sourcing vintage furniture on Facebook Marketplace, you’re looking for a lighter warm stain rather than a darker one. And when that pops up, you will drop in the car and drive for at least an hour to go pick those up. You’re looking for um pieces that have a certain type of hardware, a certain kind of metal. These consistent details. 

Or if you’re working with a local cabinet shop to create built-in solutions, they’re all going to be face frame, or they’re all going to be uh European frame. You’re going to have some clear commonalities that come up again and again and again. And then you just rinse-repeat your details as you create more and more better storage areas throughout your house. 

One way or another, every other area that I’m about to talk about in the following episodes should end up. It won’t look the same because what you need for access for visibility, for places to sit down versus places to put things away, in an entry hall versus a bedroom closet are not the same, despite the fact that in a builder grade house, the hall closet and the bedroom closet will look exactly the same. 

If you’re gonna go to the trouble to doing a custom built-in, they should be different, but they should be made out of the same materials in the same way. That’s not surprisingly the most important element of all of this. So I’m gonna point you towards the reference Pinterest board, towards the links I’m gonna drop in the show notes page today. 

You can find all of that at midmodest.com slash 2603. And I’ll be back next week with specific storage solution advice for…we’ll probably start with the front door for your entry area. So catch you next week, mid mod remodeler. See you then.

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