Carl:

I've never heard of calling a closet a clothes press, but I wonder if this goes back to the days when there weren't any closets, and people commonly had a piece of furniture for storing hanging clothes.

It's commonly called a wardrobe in the US; I think in Germany it is a Schrunk, perhaps Schrunck.

I assume it comes from the sense of press of being in a crowd, since the clothes are all crowded together.

I just saw one at an auction, solid chestnut, perhaps 150 years old, with shiplap back. Unfortunately some butcher had cut a hole in the back so his television would fit in the thing. A thousand dollar wardrobe in any big city antique store, and this guy used a saber saw to reduce its value to less than $150. I bid on it up to $70 or so because I wanted the wood to make some boxes out of. It had zero antique value. Sigh.

These were very common when people built houses without closets; my house is an example. At one time it had a central hallway that divided the upper half of the house. In one of many additions, the hallway was divided into closets and access granted to one bedroom by cutting a door through from another bedroom. I'm in the process of undoing this. I'll be building wardrobes for those three bedrooms that now share a chopped up hallway as closet space.

I wonder whether people who had clothes presses just called their closets that after builders began to put closets in bedrooms.

TEd



TEd