A cloakroom is sized on garments, not on covers: you need one linear metre of rail for every 18 hanging garments, meaning around 5.5 centimetres per hanger, and in cold season 70 to 80% of guests leave a coat. A 150-cover dining room in January therefore needs 6-7 linear metres, which fits into 8-10 m² of room if the rails run in two facing rows.
Contents
How many garments actually arrive
Turnkey hotel furnishing design”/>The number of covers is only a starting point. In December and January, with an evening banquet, you reach 0.7-0.8 garments per person, allowing for people also hanging up a bag and families handing everything over together. In March and October it drops to 0.4. Between May and September, a dining room cloakroom stays almost empty and turns into storage for speakers’ easels, which is normal and should be planned for by leaving a bay of shelving free.
The critical moment isn’t drop-off but collection. At the entrance, people arrive spread over twenty or thirty minutes; at the end of a banquet, they all leave at once. An experienced attendant hands back four or five garments a minute if the hangers are numbered in sequence, three if they have to search. Two hundred coats with a single attendant means a forty-minute queue at eleven at night, which is the memory a guest leaves the property with. Above 150 garments, you need two stations, with two independent rows of rails and separate numbering, such as 1-100 and 101-200, so the two attendants don’t get in each other’s way along the same stretch.
The linear-metre table
| Covers in the room | Garments expected in cold season | Linear metres of rail | Room floor area | Staff at peak departure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40 | 30-35 | 2 m | 3-4 m² | 1 |
| 80 | 60-70 | 3.5-4 m | 5-6 m² | 1 |
| 150 | 110-130 | 6-7 m | 8-10 m² | 2 |
| 250 | 180-210 | 10-11 m | 13-16 m² | 2-3 |
| 400 | 290-330 | 16-18 m | 20-25 m² | 3-4 |
The 5.5 centimetres per garment applies to a staffed cloakroom, where the attendant compresses the hangers and knows exactly where number 74 is. In a self-service cloakroom, that rises to 8-10 centimetres, because guests need to see their own coat and pull it out without disturbing the others: for the same number of garments, the space needed nearly doubles. That’s the first figure to put on the table whenever someone suggests dropping the attendant to save money.
The floor areas in the table include the counter and the service aisle, not the waiting area in front, which needs counting separately.
Depth, height, load capacity
An adult hanger is between 42 and 45 centimetres wide, and a winter coat can be up to 12 centimetres thick. With the rail running parallel to the wall, net compartment depth shouldn’t go below 60 centimetres, and 65 is the measurement that lets hangers slide without sleeves rubbing against the back wall. Below 55 centimetres, long garments fold against the wall and come back to guests creased.
The rail should be mounted at 170 centimetres from the floor in a staffed setup: that’s the height at which an attendant of average build can hang a garment without going up on their toes, leaving 25-30 centimetres clear between the hem of a long coat and the floor. In self-service, this drops to 160-165, so guests as short as 1.6 metres can reach it. Above the rail, at 190-195, a shelf 35 centimetres deep holds hats, motorcycle helmets and bags: without that shelf, everything ends up on the floor under the coats.
The rail itself is not where you cut costs. Steel, 30 millimetre diameter, minimum 1.5 mm wall thickness, with brackets every 90-100 centimetres. Twenty wet coats per linear metre weigh between 30 and 40 kilos, and a 16-millimetre tube with supports a metre and a half apart already sags in its first season. Anyone fitting out banqueting rooms with mobile coat racks and rolling stands needs to check the same technical spec: declared load per metre, swivel castors with a brake, and a base that doesn’t tip when every garment ends up bunched at one end.
The floor under the rails stays clear and washable. In mountain properties, a collecting grille or a continuous tray is needed, because on a 200-garment evening, melted snow off jackets and ski boots adds up to several litres of water. A little air exchange stops the room, closed up at two in the morning with two hundred damp coats inside, from smelling like a cellar the next morning.
The counter, the queue and the position
The cloakroom counter top sits between 100 and 110 centimetres, the same height as the guest-facing top of the reception desk, with a usable frontage of at least 120 centimetres per station. The attendant’s aisle should be kept to a clear 70-75 centimetres and should never be the only route through when there are two stations.
In front of the counter you need a holding area at least 180 centimetres deep and as wide as the frontage plus half a metre on each side. Six people waiting for their coats fill that space, and if it isn’t there they’ll take it from the walkway anyway, blocking the exit. It’s the most common mistake in cloakrooms squeezed into a corridor niche.
On positioning, the practical rule is within ten metres of the dining room entrance and off the main line of travel. A cloakroom placed directly opposite the door creates two opposing flows along the same line; moved to one side, even just behind a screen, it works far better and doesn’t compete visually with the rest of the common area furnishings. In properties where the lobby, lounge and reception occupy separate spaces, the dining room cloakroom should sit on the dining room side rather than the lobby side, otherwise restaurant guests cross the atrium in two directions during evening check-in.
A dining room cloakroom almost never sits in a convenient shape of room: under a staircase, in a recess between two columns, behind a curved wall. We design these units bespoke in-house and build them through a supply chain of selected Italian workshops, with a single point of contact from survey to inspection, because in a six-square-metre space, the difference between a standard module and a piece drawn to the actual survey is worth two linear metres of rail.
Numbered hangers and claim tickets
Hangers should all match, in wood or metal, with the number engraved or on a riveted tag, never written in marker pen. The claim ticket set uses two matching tokens with the same number: one stays on the hanger, the other goes to the guest, typically a token or a laminated card. Numbering should run continuously with no gaps, because every gap in the sequence costs five seconds of searching, multiplied by the number of garments.
Hangers with a rotating anti-theft hook, the kind that only release by turning one way, are needed in unstaffed cloakrooms and are pointless in staffed ones. A spare stock equal to 15% of expected garments covers broken hangers and the ones guests absent-mindedly carry off along with their coat, which happens more often than you’d think and should be counted among the items that come and go unchecked during an evening.
Keep a log of garments not collected at the end of the evening, with a description and hanger number, and store them in a locked cupboard for at least thirty days. A jacket forgotten after a wedding often has a wallet in the inside pocket.
Staffed or self-service
A staffed cloakroom is the only sensible solution above 100 garments, both for collection time and for control. Below 60 garments, in meeting rooms and in hotel restaurants with a regular clientele, a wall-mounted coat rack or a self-service unit with fixed hangers works well and avoids tying up a member of staff for the whole evening.
The point usually overlooked is liability. When a garment is handed to an attendant behind a counter, this constitutes a bailment, and under Article 1784 of the Italian Civil Code, items handed over for safekeeping carry full liability for the hotelier, without the cap of a hundred times the daily room rate that applies to items simply brought into the hotel. A self-service cloakroom, where nobody takes charge of anything, sits in the lighter liability category, but only if no staff genuinely handle the garments: if an attendant hangs the coat up themselves, bailment applies even without a claim ticket. Anyone wanting to understand how this fits with the rest of a hotelier’s obligations should draw this distinction upfront, because it also affects which insurance policy to take out.
A sign reading “not responsible for unattended items” doesn’t shift liability by a millimetre in a staffed cloakroom. What’s worth doing instead is printing on the claim ticket that valuables left in pockets aren’t accepted, and repeating that verbally when a heavy coat is handed in.
The locked version, meaning individual locked lockers instead of open rails, makes sense in conference rooms where delegates return to their own garment several times a day, and in spas. It takes up roughly double the space for the same number of garments, and should only be considered if the room allows for it. The same construction standards used for bedroom wardrobes apply here: 110-degree hinges, doors that don’t warp, ABS edging on every exposed side.
The most common mistakes
A compartment only 50 centimetres deep is mistake number one, and it can’t be fixed afterwards. The second is a single continuous rail running the length of the wall, which looks like the most capacious solution but actually prevents splitting the numbering between two attendants. The third is a cloakroom with no dedicated lighting, where the attendant reads the hanger number by corridor light.
Then there’s the case of the cloakroom forgotten at design stage, which properties with a banqueting room discover at the first December event. Among the requirements looked at to understand what a four-star hotel needs to have, a cloakroom almost always appears in regional regulations wherever there’s a restaurant open to the public, and adding one after the fact almost always means stealing space from a storeroom.
If the room hosts banquets, size it on the maximum number of covers you can serve, not the average: an undersized cloakroom can’t be stretched, while one with two extra metres of rail costs a few hundred euros at fit-out stage and becomes useful space for the furnishings that rotate between rooms during the months when there are no coats to hang.
Frequently asked questions
How many metres of cloakroom are needed for 100 people?
Around four linear metres of rail in a staffed cloakroom, calculating that in cold season 70-80% of those present leave a garment and that each hanger takes up 5.5 centimetres. In a self-service cloakroom, the same number of garments needs six or seven metres, because 8-10 centimetres per hanger are needed to let guests pull out their own coat without disturbing the others.
At what height should the cloakroom rail be mounted?
At 170 centimetres from the floor when there’s an attendant, at 160-165 if the cloakroom is self-service and guests need to reach it themselves. Above the rail, a shelf at 190-195 centimetres, 35 deep, is useful for hats, helmets and bags. The floor below the rail should be left clear, because a long coat can hang down to 25-30 centimetres from the ground.
How deep should the cloakroom compartment be?
At least 60 centimetres clear with the rail parallel to the wall, ideally 65. This figure comes from hanger width, between 42 and 45 centimetres, plus the thickness of a winter garment and the clearance needed to slide hangers along. Below 55 centimetres, long coats get squashed against the back wall and come back to guests full of creases.
Is the hotel liable for a coat stolen from the cloakroom?
In a staffed cloakroom, yes, and without the value cap that applies to items simply brought into the hotel: a garment handed to an attendant falls under bailment, with full liability for the hotelier. In a self-service cloakroom, if no attendant takes charge of the garments, the position is different. Disclaimer signs don’t change liability in the first case.
How many staff are needed at the cloakroom during a banquet?
One up to 150 garments, two beyond that. The constraint isn’t drop-off at the entrance, which is spread out over time, but the final collection: an attendant hands back four or five garments a minute, so two hundred coats with a single attendant means a forty-minute queue. With two stations, it’s worth splitting the hanger numbering too, so the two attendants aren’t working the same stretch of rail.
