The One Old Home Feature I Wish Would Come Back

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Although technology has brought homeowners huge advantages in improving their homes (like these 50 Top Home Tech Products), I think there’s a lot of untapped wisdom in some of the old home features that have been phased out over time. Some of these inventions brought great use and quite a bit of charm to a home—such as dumbwaiters, picture hanging molds, and these other old home features. But there’s one feature in particular that I wouldn’t mind returning to homes, because it would save many people trips up-and-down the staircase: Laundry chutes!

Now I’m not a homeowner at the moment, but as someone who aspires to be one someday, I like to think of features that I would like, or dislike, in my future dream home. Laundry chutes aren’t exactly the feature that you find in homes these days, but it’s one that came to mind living in my current apartment.

I live in a pretty large building that holds many tenants, which means collecting a lot of trash. Our building brilliantly has a trash chute, which allows the entire building to put the trash all in one spot for collection. Since there’s a chute entrance on every floor, it’s massively convenient to throw the trash out compared to going outside to the dumpster (which is something we did previously).

Using this garbage chute does make me think of how convenient it is to not lug anything heavy down the stairs, which is something I find super inconvenient every time I have to take my laundry to the laundromat. Wouldn’t it be so easy to just have a laundry chute that went straight to my car?

Okay, okay, that doesn’t exactly make sense in the city, but it certainly would have been great to have in my childhood home. I remember lugging heavy laundry baskets of clothes up and down two flights of stairs for my mom every week. Sure, you would have to carry it up, but wouldn’t it be nice to save half of those heavy trips with a laundry chute? Plus, with easy access to a laundry chute, there’s no need to collect clothes around each room or different hampers before doing laundry. Everyone in the house can just dump their dirty clothes down the chute themselves.

I’m sure there are still some laundry chutes in homes, I mean we even have a tutorial for a laundry chute that’s pretty easy to follow. But in all honesty, it’s not something you see much anymore. So I would advocate bringing back this trend, and ending this open shelf cabinet trend.