This laundry cupboard hack is the smartest way to dry your clothes this winter – and it won't clutter up your utility room

As I learnt this week, we're officially in the season where it takes multiple days to dry a pair of jeans. And as a result, multiple days where pairs of jeans are cluttering up the laundry rack in my home. So it's time to find some innovative solutions for drying clothes faster, while helping to create a beautiful utility room that looks good too.

The built-in laundry cupboard hack that we spotted seems like the ultimate solution for winter. It means that you can keep laundry tucked away behind the facade of beautiful, colourful (if you choose) doors, but it also helps to dry clothes faster thanks to the placement of one of the best dehumidifiers.

Here's how you can achieve it too.

Built-in cupboards are a simple way to make a utility, or laundry room, look much more polished. Whether you opt for Shaker doors or something more contemporary, maximising wall space with huge amounts of storage will be the best thing you can do for your utility room storage ideas.

But it matters what is on the inside, too. One of the most genius ideas we've seen is to add a laundry rack inside your cupboards, rather than needing to suffer through having a laundry rack cluttering up the middle of the room. It's like a traditional airing cupboard, with added functionality.

Web designer, Hatty Parker, who is gradually renovating her Victorian terraced house in London, has shown us how this is done.

'Last year, we reconfigured our family bathroom and the adjoining box bedroom to create a larger bathroom, sacrificing a fifth bedroom to make space for a small laundry room,' Hatty explains.

While not in a typical utility room, placing a laundry room on the same floor as your bedroom or bathroom makes for a streamlined laundry routine.

'The idea for the drying cupboard, which sits to the right of the stacked washing machine and tumble dryer, came from wanting a cross between a traditional airing cupboard and a dedicated space where clothes could dry efficiently, but remain neatly out of sight,' Hatty continues.

'We’d been using a dehumidifier alongside a heated clothes airer for some time and found the combination worked brilliantly for drying clothes quickly, so I wanted to incorporate the same principle into a more permanent solution.'

'After doing some research, I came across a drying cupboard on Pinterest, which I used as inspiration for our own design. It features pull-out rails for hanging clothes, a dehumidifier that is plumbed into the washing machine and tumble dryer waste, and a low-wattage heating element. We also cut ventilation grilles into the cupboard doors to allow air to circulate,' Hatty explains.

There are many ways you can configure this space to work for your household, but making room for a dehumidifier or small radiator at the bottom is key to making this design decision effective. 'I'd recommend the SmartAir dehumidifier for a setup like this, as it's compact and does a great job of drying laundry. Just make sure there's enough ventilation and clearance for it to work efficiently,' Jenny McFarlane, Ideal Home's Senior Digital Editor adds.

It's a genius way to keep wet laundry out of sight, while creating a super stylish, streamlined design.

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