Our lives are filled with things. We accumulate, we collect, we purchase, and we covet. We have and we hold—literally—for years. Every so often we hit a point—too much!—and we scale back, pare down, give away, toss. What remains is what we keep, carefully selected by what we need, what our families need, what means something, what brings us joy. When we’re left with our carefully curated collection, we then must find a single place for every single thing.

The closet is the heart of the organized home. At its most basic, it’s a wardrobe of shelves, cubbies, hooks, and hangers. But more so, it’s an expression of who we are, where we’re at, and what makes us us. We are, as they say, what we wear. Because our closets house our favorite things, we craft them accordingly.

And because our lives shift and evolve, our closets do, too. Like the single twentysomething who lines the walls of her reach-in with hooks to hang the scarves she collected while traveling or studying abroad. Or the newly cohabitating couple who adds drawers to the walk-in—the top one for her grandmother’s jewelry, the second for his pocket squares. When the baby arrives, the extra closet takes on a new life, renovated with cubbies for tiny shoes and stacks of onesies. And as the kids grow up, that former nursery starts to look like the perfect spot for an expansive closet to accompany the master suite.

The closet is a container. But it’s also a blank canvas, waiting to be constructed in a way that fits our things and our one-of-a-kind lives, stage after stage after stage. Because once we’ve pared it all down, landed on the items we can’t live without—those that emanate the joy of a life well lived—we want to know exactly where to put what matters most. In their own spots, where they can always be found. In the very place made for that very thing.