Boxes and chests are among the simplest of all storage units, and also the most ancient. Once they were made as portable luggage for nomads or merchants, or for wealthy travelers with valuable possessions. Carved coffers were used for storing clothes or linen, while the bride’s dower or hope chest accompanied her to her husband’s home after marriage. Small boxes, sometimes beautifully decorated and with security locks, held coins and jewelry.

Large coffers and chests are still tremendously versatile storage for books, bedding, or clothes folded away out of season, and double up as low tables in a living room or bedroom. Paint a plain pine chest, or hunt for a carved ethnic one, if it suits your style. Antique canvas or tin trunks and well-polished leather suitcases are much in vogue for use in the same way. 

Children’s rooms can be made magically tidy in minutes by roomy toy boxes. Bedroom dressing tables look soothingly uncluttered once you acquire the habit of keeping jewelry, hair and manicure things, buttons and pins, sorted into ornamental boxes. 

Modernists equip their offices with stacked cardboard or metal boxes for files and stationery. Use rough rustic boxes or beautifully made, oval shaker ones, in different sizes, color-coded according to contents.