Secrets to Crafting the Perfect Ikea Closet Design Insider Tips for Unbelievable Results

Maybe your closet is looking a little sad, or maybe you’ve decided that this is the year you finally do something with that awkward, empty nook in the corner of your bedroom. Going the custom route could set you back thousands of dollars—but there’s a smarter solution hiding out at IKEA. Have you heard about the Pax system ? 

Chances are you’ve seen it—you just might not know it by name. The modular organization piece is incredibly easy to personalize, making it a favorite among bloggers and decor aficionados. It comes in dozens of silhouettes, ranging from tall and narrow to fully built out with shelves. Everything is finished in white (literally the perfect blank canvas), and thanks to its low price, it fits most budgets. All you need to get started on your dream wardrobe is a plan; that’s where we come in. Here are 12 of the most genius IKEA Pax hacks we’ve seen.

Chris and Julia Marcum’s viral IKEA Pax hack has inspired countless other DIYers. The seasoned renovators proved you can build a tricked-out walk-in closet for only $3, 000 (even after a contractor quoted them a cool $30, 000 to do the job). The couple still incorporated plenty of customization: On her side, Julia opted for lots of hanging space and a “denim bar, ” while Chris chose mostly closed storage for all his T-shirts. 

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To create the look of a built-in dresser in their Pax-filled closet, Jarod Sabatino and his partner, Tim, smooshed two individual open-drawer units together and, through a combination of drilling and gluing, attached fronts to hide the gaps. The final arrangement left an empty space above to display art. “Taking something generic (cost-effective particleboard wardrobes) and turning them into something great-looking was so satisfying, ” says Sabatino. 

For $150, Mallory Fletchall, the creator behind the popular design-focused Instagram account @reserve_home, transformed her famously affordable wardrobe with picture frame molding (it can be cut with simple miter shears!) and Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster. 

Farwa Moledina knew she had to do something about her bedroom’s awkward nook and roofline. Enter two Pax systems and an angle cutter. Moledina trimmed the closet’s edge to mirror the sloped ceiling, before adding wood pieces cut to fill any gaps at the top. She finished it off with two coats of navy paint, a perfect match for the wainscoting you can see in the door’s reflection.

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When Sarah and Kevin Reid-Morris bought an 1880s Victorian house with no closet in the main bedroom, they turned to IKEA’s largest Pax system. The pair purchased molding online, built a frame out of 2-by-4s, and added oversize gold handles to make the modern cabinets feel right at home in the storied space.

IKEA products. After successfully painting the wardrobe to match the rest of her room (she used Zinsser’s shellac-based primer to combat the furniture’s slick, paint-resistant surface), she added a few inches of trim to elevate the frame. Then she installed IKEA shelves and drawers inside to create a dream organization system, all with just one trip to the store.

If you’re low on space, elevate your Pax frame with a wood base to store bulkier items (like a suitcase) underneath. Just measure the base to match your specific measurements and…voilà! Everything has a rightful, and stylish, place.

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In this designer’s nursery, a floor-to-ceiling Pax is ideal for housing her daughter’s art supplies and homework. The only thing she brought in to mix up the Shaker-style front was a few simple leather pulls—it’s a small touch that makes the storage feel way more custom. 

If you’ve got a small bedroom , go for some visual trickery. Swapping out the doors for mirrors creates one large reflective surface that adds depth to the space (and makes those outfit checks exponentially easier). 

If you’re in a pinch and want a DIY that’s less of a lift, head to Superfront : The Stockholm-based brand has ready-made cabinet fronts for a number of IKEA furniture items, and many of the Pax options come with a textured pattern. There’s nothing pared back about this saturated teal dresser, and that’s fine by us.

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For anyone dealing with an attic space, look to this DIY for inspiration. This blogger custom-cut their Pax (get the how-to here ) to fit the slanted ceilings (and frame the fireplace!), then painted it the same deep gray as the walls for a monochrome look. 

If you are not afraid to spend a little more time (and have some crafting skills that go beyond beginner status), take inspiration from this bold blue closet. It requires some elbow grease—okay, a lot of elbow grease—but once it’s built, you’ll have bragging rights forever. Bonus points for the contrasting striped wallpaper on the ceiling . When I first started imagining how I wanted my closet to look, I became stuck on this image of Jenny Wolf’s closet. I absolutely adored the blue, custom cabinetry and decided I was going to figure out a way to get a similar look in my own house with a non-custom budget.

I initially assumed that we would make all the cabinetry from scratch, but Cory brought me back to reality with the truths that 1) we’d never built a cabinet in our lives, let alone lots of drawers, shelves and boxes, and 2) the cabinetry would take

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So, I sought out a closet system that I could customize and paint to match my vision. And in this search, the IKEA Pax kept coming up as the most common, highest-rated, and budget-friendly closet system. I’m no stranger to the concept of hacking IKEA products, though we actually had never done it ourselves. In my research, I discovered that lots of people have hacked the IKEA Pax or IKEA Billy systems to create a built-in look. But there were some upgrades that I wasn’t able to find any examples of in the wild, including recessing in-cabinet lighting and adding drawer fronts for an inset, full custom cabinetry look. The drawer fronts were critical to my vision: the IKEA Pax drawers look very modular and modern to me, making them stick out like a sore thumb in our 1940’s home. Most people hid the drawers by adding doors on the wardrobe units, but we didn’t have the space, or the desire to add so many unnecessary cabinet doors to our space.

In order to achieve the high-end custom look I envisioned, we added baseboards, crown moulding, shoe moulding, recessed puck lights for in-cabinet lighting, refaced the fronts and sides of the wardrobe units with wood strips, added wood drawer fronts, added plugs to cover the unused shelving holes, wallpapered the back of the units, primed and painted everything, then swapped out the metal hanging rods for stained wooden rods, and finally added drawer hardware.

We tried to be as detailed as possible in the below steps, so I’m going to give a disclaimer that this post is massive. Let me know in the comments if anything needs further clarification and I can update to address those questions.

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This is where the Pax Planning tool on the IKEA website comes in handy. We cataloged how much space we each needed for our clothes (High, Medium, Low) and storage type by clothing category in a spreadsheet, and then I referenced it as I created each of our sides of the closet to ensure we had enough space for our existing wardrobe items and our storage preferences. For instance, I fold my jeans, while Cory prefers to hang his, and he dresses business casual for work, meaning there’s a lot of shirts to hang. When it came to choosing accessories, I opted out of the slightly gimmicky IKEA accessories, like the pants hanger, the shoe trees, etc. in favour of clean, classic closet designs. This isn’t to say that they aren’t helpful to maximize storage, but it’s very challenging to make them look seamless in a high-end custom closet. This limited our options down to hanging rods, drawers and shelves.

For reference, the room is 14.6′ long by 6.5′ wide, and we opted for the deeper IKEA Pax units on one side (23″ deep) and shallower units on the other wall (13″ deep), which allowed for a wide walkway between the two units.

We only have standard 8” ceilings, so we had to build the units in the room and also couldn’t build a platform for the wardrobe units to sit on. If we had higher ceilings we would have elevated the units on a wooden base to ensure that we weren’t losing any potential storage space when we added baseboards. We shimmed under the units to ensure they were completely level, ensuring that the units were level to one another, so when we ran the baseboards across the front of them, everything looked flush.

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We ordered these puck lights off Amazon and hardwired them into an electrical box, so we could switch them on and off when entering the room. In order to reach all six of our closet units, we had to order extra extension cords. We fed these cords in a chain, where for each unit, one light