Our Entrance: Maximising storage while keeping it minimalist

239

Minimalist
HDB (Maisonette)
≥1,500 sqft
3 br
Couple Living

Hi everyone! Welcome to our post on our entrance/entry way. Overall, we kept the entry way minimal and prioritised storage as much as we could. Follow us along as we share a little more about our thought processes! When you first arrive at our house, you would be greeted by the digital doorbell and door locks that we purchased from COMEX IT fair 2023 :P This was a non-nego by Mrs because she has a 100% success rate of forgetting her keys. Needless to say, this has truly been a life saver and life changer for the both of us who grew up with manual door locks.
As you can see, we kept the entry rather open and bare, keeping in line with our theme of having a minimalist and bright-lit home. Since we knew we were going to use a digital door lock, we didn't see a need to create an entry niche as that would require us to build up a false wall and make the space narrower than it should be. We also decided to top up a little more for reeded glass for our window to maintain privacy while allowing for maximum light to enter.
Something we highly recommend is incorporating a full-length mirror at the entryway if your house can accommodate it! It has been so helpful for us (read: Mrs) in doing the necessary fit checks before leaving home. On the left of the mirror is an open counter. We have not quite figured out a use for it yet, so it remains a space for us to display cute items currently :P We may start working on printing some photos of our wedding or other trips together to display! It's really still a work in progress and we'd be more than happy to hear from you guys as well on what we can do with the space! Those three small doors you see below the counter are the designated spaces for our shoes. In our household, Mr is the one who owns more shoes while Mrs only has 5 pairs max. We are hoping that this space will suffice for now, but if necessary, we can always tap on the shelves in the taller units next to the mirror to store our shoes in future.
A close up of some of the items we have displayed at our entrance!
Another useful feature that we have enjoyed thus far is this built-in settee. This settee is around 90cm long and can sit up to two adults! It has been very convenient for us as we no longer need to do balancing exercises every time we want to head out hahaha. We kept the settee a floating one so that there is space beneath it to place our more commonly used shoes. (Keeping it real here by showing you guys how grey our white shoes are now xD)
As maisonettes typically do not have a designated store room aside from the space under the stairs, we knew we needed to create storage for ourselves as we were intending to live here for a long time. Hence, we worked with our ID to create taller cabinets with plenty of customisable space within to future proof our needs.
(once again keeping it real by showing the mess here hahaha) We also specifically requested for a space to house our robot vacuum such that it can be hidden from sight when not in use. This is how it looks like when we open the cabinet! There is sufficient space to access it comfortably, and change the water etc where needed. The shelves are also AA-tracked so the heights are fully customisable. Thanks for coming along with us on this mini tour of the entrance! We'd love to hear your thoughts on how you customised your entry way to suit your needs as well :D