Women want a clutter-free home

What do women want?

That age-old question should be on the minds of builders, remodelers, and manufacturers of products for the home. Why? Because 91 percent of all new household purchases are made by or influenced by women, according to Paul Foresman, who earlier today at the International Builders’ Show delivered the “Her Home in 2015” seminar, which focused on the design and amenities that women will want—and expect—in their homes in the coming years.

The typical American woman is stressed, and builders/remodelers and manufacturers need to design spaces and products that will make her life easier and her home a haven from the madness, says Foresman, director of business development for Design Basics, a home-plan-design company and runs the quarterly publication Her Home.

Some other key points Foresman made during his presentation:

• Household messes cause stress, but cleaning is no walk in the park either. The solution? Provide women with products and spaces that are easier to clean, say showers without doors.

• Women want to eliminate clutter in the bathroom, kitchen, and garage. They’ll expect to see well-designed storage systems that can rein in the mess.

The simplest stress reducer I can imagine? Have everyone in the house put his or her stuff away without nagging. My colleagues and I agree that would alleviate a lot of tension.—Celia Kuperszmid Lehrman

Essential information: Read our report on closet and garage organizers to find the best products to unclutter your home.

Comments

[Lois Eyre]

I'm sorry to bother you with this, since the blog doesn't seem to mention your January 2008 article rating sheets. I hope you can pass my comments on to the appropriate person.

I noticed that you rated sheets for several different factors, including softness, and by including softness, you may have fallen into a trend gap. There are quite a few of us who aren't really looking for softness in our sheets. The whole business of thread counts and types of threads are related to the consumers' eagerness to find the "softest" sheets possible, but this is a rather hard quality to define. The higher the thread count, the finer the threads ought to be, thus the softer the sheets ought to be, but really the softness of sheets depends on the weave as much as anything.

As I said above, there are a lot of us who aren't really looking for soft sheets. We want crisp, smooth sheets. Soft sheets are the bane of my existence, especially when the weather around here turns hot and humid, because soft sheets stick to my skin with the least amount of perspiration and the softer the sheets, the more they stick to my skin if I perspire. When this happens, and I roll over in my sleep, the sheets roll with me, resulting in a completely unmade bed by morning. I want crisp, smooth percale sheets (percale is meant to be an extremely smooth weave, not a soft weave) and they are becoming almost impossible to find. Percale sheets with a 200 - 300 thread count are the ultimate in luxury, as long as those threads haven't been selected or treated for softness.

It's really the quality of the weave that you ought to be considering. A sateen weave can be very smooth and very soft; a percale ought not to be soft. I've found sheets with thread counts higher than 450 which have been made with an oxford weave, resulting in thick sheets with a rough, very uncomfortable surface.

Please ask your experts to focus a bit more on the type of weave with which sheets have been made. Figure out what the different weaves ought to produce in sheets, then rate the sheets according to how well they give the consumer the qualities inherent to each weave. The final information would be far more useful.

One more thing: a good percale sheet can be made with a blend of cotton and polyester, as well as with 100% cotton. The test results complained that most of the sheets tested needed to be ironed. There are 100% cotton sheets which have been treated so that they will not wrinkle; these tend to have a sort of sticky feel to them. Sheets made with an appropriate blend, more cotton than polyester, that is, come out of the dryer without wrinkles, and go onto the bed without ironing. If they are percale sheets, and if that means they are crisp and smooth, it would almost be miraculous. It would be wonderful if Consumer Reports, by its reporting, could encourage manufacturers of sheets to produce this sort of miracle once more; unfortunately, IMO, the recent craze for "softness" has resulted in fewer and fewer decent sheets.

Thank you.

Lois Eyre

[R. Arnold]

Thank you Lois. Your post did not miss a beat. I thought I was the only person in the world looking for cool, crisp, smooth sheets. Then, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine and discovered that she, too, was going nuts trying to find crips sheets. After our conversation, I went on-line and discovered that there seem to be thousands of us looking for a smooth, cool feel. I cannot stand the feel of those high thread count "sateen" sheets that seem to fill the shelves of all the linen stores these days. Do people really like that warm, wrinkly, unmade bed "improved" feel of the sheets on the market today? I have had all cotton percale and cotton/poly blends that were wonderful and even the cotten ones did not need ironing if removed from the dryer and folded right away. But, alas, they can no longer be found. I think the manufacturers are putting one over on the public with these high priced "soft" sheets. What to do?

[Barbara]

I agree; I love the crisp sheets. I certainly don't want to go back to ironing sheets (not that I ever did as I always bought the blends or the cottoms that say "No Iron"). Word of warning to anyone who contemplates buying these expensive high-thread count, 100% cotton sheets---don't buy the sateen weave if you have a cat! This type of weave snags easily, and your cat jumping up on the bed will rip these sheets up in no time.

A plea to the sheet manufacturers: Elastic all the way around the sheets, please! Nothing is more irritating than having the corners popping off the ends during the night. Some of this is due to excessive shrinkage, too.

But my pet peeve is coverlets and quilts no longer being made in Queen size. This combination Full/Queen size the manufacturers have switched to for their own convenience is barely big enough for the thick Queen size mattress. By the time the coverlet or quilt is washed, it doesn't even meet the minimum requirement of covering all of the mattress.