SACRED SPACE Some like to hang out in their closets

The personal sanctuary can lend itself to intimate personalization.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
It certainly wasn't what Virginia Woolf had in mind.
When the writer coined the famous phrase, "A room of one's own," in a lecture at Cambridge in 1928, she was addressing a woman's need for space and opportunity if her intellectual life was to flourish.
Well, Ginny, we got the room, all right -- though it's usually just a cubical.
Today we need a new type of room of our own. A place for quiet reflection and self-actualization before we log on to a hyper-connected world.
Hello, closet!
A closet is where lovers aren't welcome, where children shouldn't play and where even maids have very little business. It's a place to hide secrets, savor flimsy, lovely things or unhook a work-a-day uniform.
It's a sacred space.
Hello Campos went one better. When she built her Miami house several years ago, she turned her closet into a fortress.
"It's a hurricane shelter," said Campos, perched on the moving ladder she uses to reach the second story of her walk-in closet -- one of two, actually. "It's all concrete."
The upper tier is where she keeps formal gowns and luggage. It's also where she stores the mink, fox and chinchilla, cooled by an air-conditioning vent a few inches away.
Down below are the gossamer blouses, the Dolce & amp; Gabbana getups, the La Perla underthings she keeps tucked into their own Ziploc bags so she can grab them and go for a jaunt to Sao Paulo or St. Tropez.
"I'm very proud of my closet because I feel happy when I look for things," said Campos, originally from Brazil.
As it turns out, bad weather has never caused her to hunker down among her beloved boots and bags. But sometimes she takes shelter there anyway.
"If it's a day when I'm very up, I just go," said Campos, who has designed clothing. "But if I'm a little blue, hours and hours. I try things on, I put them here," she said, gesturing to a shelf. "I try other things ..."
Turning a closet into a sanctuary doesn't require running water or skilled labor.
"I always rent," said Catalina Rojas. "So I pick up what's already there and adopt it."
Fond memories
Rojas thinks her fondness for the space comes from tender memories of her grandmother's armoire in Chile. "It was the like the treasure place in her bedroom. You could hide in there. It was small, but she had things like chocolates in there," she said.
Through the years, she has used her closets as work spaces, housing her desk and computer, and stationery tools. At one time she found it to be the perfect, quiet place for her napping infant.
These days, Rojas has a closet as big as a queen-size bed, where she has pictures and all her necklaces on display. "I love to hang out in it."
Closets lend themselves to intimate personalization that other areas of the home might not, said Rosalyn Cherry, a professional organizer for 11 years in New York City. "If you share a space with someone, it has to be more of a combined imprint," she said.
Of course, closet organizers hate clutter. They want you to pitch anything you can't wear right now or don't want to. For Rojas, though, it's exactly the things that aren't practical that make her closet feel so special.
"I keep in there the things, if I ever had to leave, the things I would take with me. Photos when I was little. My earrings. Hidden things," she said.
"I also have all my bags in there, everything that I wear, of course."
That's the other thing about closets. They hold your clothes.