Utility Design
The room most homes get wrong — and how to get it right
The utility room is the working infrastructure of a home. When it is designed well, everything else in the house becomes easier to maintain. When it is not, disorder propagates outward from it.
The problem
Why utility rooms fail
Most utility rooms are designed residually — the space left after the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms have been planned. They receive what remains of the budget and whatever cabinetry the kitchen fitter has left over.
The result is predictable: a room that never quite holds everything it needs to hold, where cleaning products compete for space with the washing machine, where the bin lives on the floor because there is nowhere else for it.
The Hailo Colours approach treats the utility room as a primary room — planned first, not last, with its own set of functional requirements and aesthetic logic.
The solution
A designed service space
A well-designed utility room is organised around four functional zones: the laundry zone (washer, dryer, ironing, airing), the cleaning zone (products, equipment, mop and broom storage), the waste zone (separation bins, bag storage), and the bulk storage zone (seasonal, cleaning supplies, excess provisions).
Each zone has its own storage logic. The mistake most utility rooms make is treating all four as one undifferentiated storage requirement, then wondering why the space never works.
System components
What a designed utility room contains
Stacked appliance housing with integrated workflow
Washer-dryer stack unit with a fold-out ironing board at 90cm height. Retractable drying rail extended above the appliance stack. Laundry sorting bags on a hanging rail system below the fold-out. Detergent and fabric-care products in a pull-out unit directly adjacent to the machine.
Broom cabinet and cleaning-product housing
Full-height 30cm-deep broom cabinet for long-handled equipment. Interior door hooks for smaller items. Pull-out base unit for cleaning products with spill-resistant lining. Separate locked cabinet for hazardous products in households with children.
Multi-stream separation centre
Four-compartment pull-out base unit for organic, recycling, glass, and residual waste. Capacity scaled to household size — 40L per compartment for families of four or more. Positioned near the utility room exit route to exterior bins for minimal carrying distance.
Tall unit system for seasonal and surplus storage
Full-height cabinet units with adjustable shelving for seasonal items, bulk provisions, and items awaiting redistribution. Upper zones for rarely accessed items. Pull-out base drawers at floor level for heavy items — removes the need to lift from floor height.
Plan your utility room
Use the Utility Space Optimizer
Input your room size, primary functions, and access type. The tool calculates an efficiency score and generates a tailored set of optimisation recommendations.
Open Planning Tools