Stop Hiding Your Shoe Racks: The Home Depot Find You'll Want To Show Off

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For many homes, shoe racks are a fact of life. In some homes, they're also an eyesore — little more than open-faced cubbies that can't hide scuffed heels, caked-on mud, and other shoe-related unmentionables. If your shoe storage set-up fits this description, your inclination might be to just hide the shoe rack. However, Home Depot has a handsome shoe storage solution – the Shirley Engineered Wood Shoe Storage Cabinet by Baxton Studio. With a design that boasts both open cubby space and shoe shelves hidden behind two stylish doors, you won't want to hide this cabinet away at all.

It's slightly less than 3 feet wide and just over 3 feet high. Its depth comes in at just under 14 inches, and it comes in walnut or dark brown hues. Built as advertised in Home Depot's photos, the space behind its two doors holds 18 pairs of shoes. The open cubby shelves to the side of the doors have room for another six pairs of shoes. However, if you have boots and other tall shoes, not to worry. You'll just need to adjust the height of the shelves. 

Or, if you need more depth for something like some size 12 shoes, you can do what one clever buyer, Redfox, did: Flip the doors around. This keeps your shoes hidden behind the slatted doors. The door's design is a feature that creates circulation and also hides your shoes. This reduces the possibility that the Home Depot shoe rack becomes an eyesore. The change in the door position places the vertical bar that holds the slatted doors together on the outside of the cabinet instead of on the inside. Once the bar is outside the cabinet, there's room enough for those size 12s, even with the doors closed.

This is a handsome piece, so it's something you won't have to be talked into showing off. However, there are a couple of potentially problematic scenarios that a cabinet like this would solve. Here's the first: Your abode's design features an all-in-one space. This could be a studio apartment, where everything is in one room. It could also be a home with an open floor plan, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen all in one space. 

Here's how to meet that challenge head-on, without you having to hide the cubby. Reserve the spaces behind the doors just for shoes. Even with the slat design on the doors, the shoes stay well hidden. When you're setting up the shelves sans doors, use the space to store decorative items like photos in frames, small sculptures, and books instead of shoes. On the top of the unit, you could display an old-fashioned record collection with a turntable. There are no unsightly or even boring shoe storage cabinets with this setup. If you style it this way, it's much more aligned with the parameters of your all-in-one space and your decor goals.

The other situation worth mentioning is if your decor style is something contemporary, like mid-century modern. From a design perspective, the Shirley cabinet at Home Depot gels with the aesthetics of modern styles. The cabinet's engineered wood mimics the appearance of real wood, while its metal powder-coated feet capture the vibe of modern decor styles. If you've put off buying a shoe cubby because you were afraid it wouldn't fit in with the rest of your decor, rest assured that this piece will look great in modern home styles. You definitely won't need to hide this piece away in a closet.