The Empty Space on Top of Your Wardrobe: Use It, Style It or Leave It

Picture it: I’m standing on a barstool that is one hundred percent not rated for standing on, holding a shoebox full of tangled Christmas lights, one foot already committed to the top shelf of my wardrobe, when my roommate Mara walks past the door, looks up, and just goes “why does that look like a shrine.” That is the exact second this whole argument started, before I’d even set the box down properly, and it has been going in our group chat ever since under a thread that is literally titled “wardrobe top drama.” So here’s my actual position on this, because I have now spent an embarrassing amount of a week thinking about maybe six square feet of dusty wardrobe real estate: that space is either working for you as storage, or it’s doing a proper job as display, or it’s empty on purpose. The one option that’s wrong every single time is the accidental default, where whatever was nearest just gets shoved up there and forgotten about.

Storage is the honest answer, but not for everything

Most people’s wardrobe top becomes storage by accident, not decision, and to be fair that’s basically what the space is designed for anyway, it just needs some actual thought behind what goes up versus what you just don’t think about. The stuff that belongs there is anything you touch twice a year, tops. Spare bedding, the big suitcase you only drag out for one trip a year, the Christmas decorations, that box of sentimental cards you’ve been meaning to scan onto a laptop for approximately four years now. Lidded baskets or a couple of proper labeled bins beat a loose cardboard box, and not just because it looks nicer, though it does. It’s because reaching up blind into an open box is genuinely how you end up finding your favorite sweater has been cohabiting with three dead phone chargers and a single AirPod you’d fully mourned and moved on from.

Here’s where it actually goes wrong though.

Nothing heavy goes up there, full stop. Anything you wouldn’t want landing on your head at 7am while you’re half asleep reaching for socks doesn’t belong six feet up behind a wardrobe door, that includes hardback books, anything glass, and for some reason my label maker, which I have decided lives on a shelf like a normal object now. Don’t store anything you need weekly either, because “handy storage” and “requires a step stool every Tuesday” are not the same category no matter how organized the bin looks on camera. And it gets warm and a little damp up near the ceiling in a lot of apartments, so paper and leather need an actual sealed container, not an open tote, unless you enjoy discovering mildew right before a move-out inspection. My landlord genuinely does not care that your ceiling storage looked organized in a photo, she cares that nothing fell and dented anything on the way down, and that’s basically the only review that matters here.

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Styling it only works if you’ll actually look up, otherwise just leave it empty

The styled version, baskets plus a faux plant plus one leaned frame, photographs so well it’s basically become its own trend, and yes, I did the version of this back in March. Sent a photo to the group chat before I’d even finished arranging it, got “obsessed” from one roommate and “when’s the last time you dusted that” from the other, and honestly the second opinion has aged a lot better than the first. Because here’s the part nobody mentions about styling above a wardrobe: it sits above your normal eyeline, which means after the first day you basically stop looking at it, which means it quietly turns into a collector of dust and quiet disappointment instead of the little display moment you filmed.

If you’re going to do it anyway, keep it small and light, faux plants only since real ones dry out up there fast and nobody’s climbing a stool to water them properly, a couple of woven baskets for texture, maybe one print leaned rather than hung straight. Skip anything you’d normally need to wipe down weekly, because you will not wipe it down weekly, I’m telling you this from direct experience, and skip candles entirely, since anything flammable sitting above head height near a light fixture is a genuinely bad idea dressed up as decor.

That leaves the third option, which I think is honestly underrated: empty. Not styled, not stacked, just clean and open. In a rental especially, an empty wardrobe top means one less thing collecting dust, one less thing your landlord clocks during inspection, and zero risk of it turning into the shame pile everyone’s group chat eventually roasts. If your storage need is real, use proper bins and be strict about weight and access. If you actually want the display look, keep it minimal and be honest with yourself that you’ll dust it about twice a year. And if neither of those is true for your space, just leave it. Empty isn’t a failure up there, it’s the one option that never turns into an argument on a barstool at 9pm.