An open wardrobe without doors is 45-50 cm deep instead of the 60-62 cm of a hinged-door one, doesn’t need the 60-65 cm of opening clearance in front, and costs 25 to 35% less for the same width and finish. In a narrow room that means recovering half a square metre of usable space and a walkway at the foot of the bed that wasn’t there before. The price is paid by the guest, or rather by whoever walks into the room and sees the open suitcase, the badly hung clothes and the dust on the top shelf.
Contents
Where the saved centimetres come from
A contract wardrobe with hinged doors measures 60-62 cm in external depth, with 55-57 cm clear inside, because the back panel, the door rebate and the thickness of the front eat up the rest. The sliding-door version is deeper, 65-68 cm, since the two doors run on offset tracks. The open unit stops at 45-50 cm because it doesn’t need to house anything beyond the rail and the shelves.
Here’s the technical limit that decides everything. A standard hanger is 42-45 cm wide, so hanging garments front-on, meaning parallel to the back wall, needs at least 50 cm clear. Below that measurement there are two options: the pull-out rail, which hangs garments crosswise and costs €25-45 a piece but is one more mechanism for guests to force, and after a year of daily use it starts to play up, or the side rail, hung between the two side panels in the short direction, which lets you hang garments sideways and holds eight to ten hangers. In city hotels with short stays, eight hangers are enough. In a resort with seven-night stays and two large suitcases, they aren’t.
With 50 cm clear depth, on the other hand, the rail sits in the normal position and the wardrobe works exactly like a closed one, just without the front. It’s the measurement I’d always aim for: below 48 cm you start needing acrobatics.
What you save in euros
Doors aren’t just an extra piece of panel. They’re the panel, the edging on all four sides, the hinges, the adjustment, the assembly and the alignment checks on site, and they’re also the first thing to wear out, because a wardrobe door in a hotel room gets opened and closed four or five times a day for three hundred days a year.
| Wardrobe type, 120 cm width | External depth | Clearance needed in front | Indicative 2026 cost | Cleaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three hinged doors, chipboard with 2 mm ABS edge | 60-62 cm | 60-65 cm | €700-1,300 | interior protected, dust every 2-3 weeks |
| Two sliding doors with top track | 65-68 cm | 30 cm | €900-1,600 | bottom track needs vacuuming, a weak point |
| Open unit with slatted back panel, rail and two shelves | 45-50 cm | 45-50 cm | €450-850 | shelves need wiping at every room turnover |
| Plasterboard alcove with laminate back panel and rail | 45-55 cm | 45-50 cm | €350-600 plus building work | as above, plus the corners of the recess |
The €300-450 gap per room, across twenty-five rooms, is nine to eleven thousand euros that goes somewhere else: into a better mattress, a proper headboard, decent lighting. It’s the reasoning that leads many projects to choose the open unit, not the aesthetics.
Watch out, though, for the plasterboard alcove, which on paper is the cheapest line in the quote. The building work, the plastering, the painting, the corner bead and the load-bearing rail embedded in the stud all push the cost up, and the result is a piece of furniture that can never be moved again. At the next refit, ten years on, it has to be demolished. Bespoke wardrobe units for irregularly shaped hotel rooms solve this better, because they follow the slope of a window reveal or a beam without any building work, and remain a piece of furniture, meaning an asset you can depreciate and resell.
The real problem: dust and the suitcase
In a room with a window onto a busy street, the top shelf of an open unit is visibly dusty by the third day. It’s not just an impression, it’s the reason why in many properties the open unit ends up covered with a curtain after the first season. Housekeeping has to run an extra cloth over the shelves and rail at every room turnover, forty to sixty seconds, which across twenty rooms adds up to a quarter of an hour a day. It’s not a disaster, but it needs factoring in when working out how many rooms one housekeeper can clean in a shift.
The second effect is visual. An open unit is a piece of the room the guest furnishes in your place. If a guest stays one night and hangs up a jacket, the effect is tidy. If they stay seven days with two suitcases, what you see walking into the room is their mess, and the perceived category drops along with the photo that guest will never take. It’s exactly why I rarely recommend the open unit in resorts, while in a design-led city hotel it works very well and becomes part of the room’s language, as seen in the more pared-back interpretations of minimalist hotel style.
There’s also a question of smell that nobody puts in writing. A wet coat hung in an open unit dries in the room, and in a 16 sqm space with mechanical ventilation the smell lingers. In the mountains, with a ski clientele, this alone is enough to make people prefer a door.
The hangers, which disappear
In a closed wardrobe a standard hanger costs €0.60-1.20 and few go missing. In an open unit they disappear, not out of malice: guests pack them in their suitcase without thinking. The solution is a ring or fixed-head hanger, which slots onto a round 25 mm rail and can’t be slid off without dismantling the rail: it costs between €1.20 and €3 a piece depending on material, and a wooden one with a metal ring lasts ten years. The added benefit is that nobody moves them onto the bed, because they can’t be detached.
The drawback is that guests can’t take the hanger into the bathroom to hang a robe while showering, and in higher categories this gets noticed. The compromise I use: a security rail with twelve fixed hangers plus two loose courtesy hangers with a standard hook, resting on a wall-mounted or freestanding coat stand near the entrance, which also serves for the coat of someone who’s only popped in for a coffee.
On the minimum number, most regional classification rules require a wardrobe or wardrobe space with a minimum number of hangers per bed, usually six or eight, without saying anything about doors. The open unit is therefore fully permitted, as long as the room’s mandatory fixtures and fittings are all present and accounted for, including the safe and the suitcase space.
The hybrid solutions, which are almost always the right answer
In practice, a fully open unit is rare in projects that work well. What you see more often is a piece split in two: a closed lower section with a solid door, housing drawers, safe and minibar, and an open upper section with a rail and a hat shelf. You hide what needs hiding, keep the depth at 50-55 cm and still save on two thirds of the hardware.
The other useful variant is a class 1 fire-rated fabric curtain, running on a ceiling track, which closes the unit when needed and disappears when the guest wants to grab something quickly. It costs €90-180 per room with certified fabric, and it washes and gets replaced without touching the furniture. In rooms with low ceilings, where a full-height wardrobe crushes the space, the curtain also has the advantage of not adding a dark mass to the wall.
On lighting: an open unit with no light is a black hole in the wall, especially if the back panel is dark. An LED strip of 4-6 W per metre at 2,700-3,000 K along the top front, triggered by a proximity sensor, costs €40-90 per room and completely changes how the piece reads, both in photos and in person.
Where I’d put it, and where I wouldn’t
I’d put it in a city hotel with an average stay of one or two nights, in a design hotel where the unit is part of the design and has a back panel worth showing, and in any room under 15 sqm where the 60 cm of door-opening clearance would block the walkway. I wouldn’t put it in a resort, in a mountain hotel, in a property that works with groups and large suitcases, or in a five-star hotel, where guests expect a door that closes.
In four-star properties it depends on the design, not the category: a unit with a real wood back panel, glass shelves and integrated lighting sits perfectly well in a superior room, while the same unit in white chipboard with a chrome rail looks like a gym coat rack. When the budget doesn’t stretch to the richer design, the right call is to go back to contract-grade wardrobes with doors and save elsewhere, because a badly done open wardrobe stands out more than an unremarkable closed one.
Frequently asked questions
How much space does an open wardrobe save? Between 10 and 15 cm of depth, since it goes from 60-62 cm down to 45-50, and it also removes the 60-65 cm of clear space needed in front to open a hinged door. In a room three metres wide that’s half a square metre of genuinely usable space and an easier walkway at the foot of the bed. Below 48 cm clear, though, hangers no longer sit front-on and you need a pull-out rail.
Where do you put security hangers? On a round 25 mm rail fixed between the sides of the unit: ring or fixed-head hangers slot onto the rail and can’t be slid off as long as the rail stays mounted. They cost between €1.20 and €3 a piece against €0.60-1.20 for a normal hanger, and in a doorless wardrobe they pay for themselves in the first season. It’s still worth leaving two loose courtesy hangers, since the fixed ones can’t be taken into the bathroom.
Does an open wardrobe work in a four-star hotel? Yes, if the unit is properly designed: a wood or quality laminate back panel, glass or painted metal shelves, an integrated LED rail and a hat shelf. In that case it’s a design element and holds its own against the category. A unit in plain light chipboard with a simple chrome rail, on the other hand, reads as a budget cut and stands out immediately in a superior room.
How do you hide a guest’s clutter? The most common solution is the split unit: a closed lower section with a solid door for drawers, safe and minibar, and an open upper section with a rail and shelf. Alternatively, a class 1 fire-rated fabric curtain on a ceiling track, costing €90-180 per room, which washes and gets replaced without dismantling anything. On long stays with large suitcases, neither is quite enough, and it’s worth going back to doors.
