Where to put a hall tree

Where should a hall tree go?

On the longest uninterrupted wall nearest the door you actually use, out of the door's swing arc, and fixed into something structural. It needs 28 to 39 inches of clear wall, 11 to 14 inches of floor depth, and about six feet of height with nothing above it.

The entryway

This is the room hall trees are designed for, and the constraint is almost always the door swing rather than the wall. Open the front door fully and mark the arc; the hall tree goes outside it, which usually means the wall opposite the hinge side or the return wall.

The second constraint is the walkway. At 11.8 to 13.8 inches deep, a hall tree leaves 22 to 24 inches in a hallway at the code minimum, and a coat hanging on it projects another three to five inches at chest height. If the front door opens straight into a corridor, that is the number to check.

The mudroom

A mudroom is where a hall tree is least necessary and most often bought. If you have a whole room, a bench with cubbies and a separate rail above it stores three to four times as many pairs and lets you put the hooks at heights that suit the people using them.

Where a hall tree does earn its place in a mudroom is against a short return wall too narrow for a bench — beside a door, between two windows. Its whole advantage is vertical storage from a narrow footprint, and a mudroom usually has one wall like that even when the main wall is generous.

The garage

Two things change. The wall is often masonry or a stud partition rather than plasterboard on timber, which changes the fixing entirely — a masonry anchor rather than a stud screw, and you need the right drill.

The other is humidity. A garage is unheated and damp for much of the year, and particleboard carcasses absorb that. Of the materials in our roundup, the steel-framed models and the bamboo bench handle it best; a laminated particleboard hall tree in an unheated garage will swell at the edges within a couple of winters.

The laundry room

The best case for a hall tree in a laundry room is not coats, it is a drying rail and somewhere to sit while dealing with boots. The hooks take damp things that need to hang; the bench takes the weight of someone reaching into a machine.

The thing to check is width. Laundry rooms are usually a run of appliances plus whatever is left, and 28 inches of clear wall is more than many have. Measure the gap between the machine and the corner before anything else.

The fixing, wherever it goes

Every hall tree in our roundup is about six feet tall on a one-foot base and weighs 27 to 36 pounds, with the heaviest load hung at the top. One maker states five screws into the wall as a requirement; the geometry says the same thing about all of them.

That fixing needs to land in something structural — a stud, a masonry wall, or a cavity anchor properly rated for the load. A plasterboard plug intended for a picture frame is not adequate, and the failure mode is the whole unit coming down with coats on it.