In planning the renovation of her Sherman Oaks, Calif., kitchen, Lynne Lainer knew above all what she didn’t want.

Her two sons’ backpacks and soccer shin guards cluttering her kitchen counters, and the family’s cell phones and personal organizers plugged into all the outlets so that there wasn’t even room for a toaster.

Her architect responded by offering an increasingly common solution: an extension that, when the renovation is completed this summer, will accommodate cubbies, a built-in storage bench and charging stations. It also will provide a proper transition between the garage and the rest of the house.

On the floor plan, the 9-by-12-foot space is called a mudroom, but Lainer doesn’t really think of it like that.

“It’s Southern California — it barely rains,” she says, adding that in any case an overhang between the garage and the mudroom door will eliminate all contact with the elements. “There will be no mud in the mudroom,” she says. “I just call it the room where we will channel all our'’ belongings.

As American houses become larger, less formal and more child-centric, the lowly mudroom is finally having its day.

In its new incarnation, it is not some dark corner of the laundry room or a bench in the garage. Instead — thanks partly, perhaps, to the example of long-time mudroom champion Martha Stewart — it is a full-fledged room, often decked out with hardwood floors, crown molding, windows and a computer or security station.

Stephen Melman, director of economic service for the National Association of Home Builders, says that a survey of architects done by the organization last summer found that the mudroom was taking on increased importance in new homes, especially because the laundry room now often is placed on the second floor, near the bedrooms.

“Architects are telling us that all upscale homes” — at least those built in the past two or three years — “have transition rooms,” he says, using one of the terms that has replaced “mudrooms” in some parts of the country.

And when something becomes popular in high-end houses, he adds, “we expect it to start migrating to average-price homes,” especially those with primarily open floor plans that need some kind of space where clutter can be organized and stored.

Evolving needs

Particularly in the South and arid West, these rooms might be called transition stations, commuter stations or friends-and-family entrances. But they share a common purpose: connecting the side or garage entrance to the house, usually by way of the kitchen, and offering cubicles or lockers for each family member in a cheerful, highly organized space reminiscent of a preschool classroom.

In the Northeast and Midwest, where winters are predictably slushy, there has always been the need for space to store coats and muddy boots before entering a home. But until only a few generations ago, most Americans had so few possessions that they could fit all their outerwear and outdoor equipment into the closet under the stairs in the front hall, or, in the case of certain New England houses, a tiny boxlike vestibule that juts out from the front door.

“It’s the proliferation of things that has been the major historical change,” says Virginia McAlester, an architectural historian in Dallas and an author of A Field Guide to American Houses.

“Every decade the amount of stuff people have to store has gone up,” she says. Of course, not all early mudrooms were compact or utilitarian, or even at the front of the house.

“The earliest mudroom I recall seeing was at the Edsel Ford estate in Maine that Martha Stewart now owns,” says Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians. “It contains a sink and is adjacent to a large walk-in refrigerator to store all your freshly cut flowers.”

Migrating entryways

In the postwar years, as the carport became the most frequently used entrance for many Americans, the mudroom moved from the front to the back of the house. But it is only recently, as the average house has increased to palatial proportions, that the typical mudroom has approached the scale of the 151/2-by-9-foot one on the Ford Estate.

Michael Medick, vice president of architecture and planning at John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods, which builds some 1,600 homes in the Southeastern states each year, says the company began getting requests for more attractive garage entrances in the larger homes it was building about eight years ago.

“What you had was these homes with big, grand entrances, but the owner was hitting the remote and coming through the three-car garage,” he says. “So the rich foyer began migrating to the back of the house with the idea, let the owner enjoy some of this.”

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