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Posh Laundry Rooms to Make Dirty Clothes (Almost) Enjoyable

To attack roughly 24 loads of laundry a week, Ellie Cartner brought in heavy artillery. Her family’s 8,900-square-foot house in Statesville, N.C., has two laundry rooms, one near her three daughters’ bedrooms and the other in the master bedroom closet. It’s equipped with a washer and dryer, built-in ironing board, center island for folding and sink for spot cleaning.

“It is the most efficient space in my home,” says Ms. Cartner, a 40-year-old part-time pharmacist who also works at her husband’s landscaping company.

“She didn’t spare any expense,” says Travis Walker, president of Walker Woodworking, a Shelby, N.C., company that built the cream-colored cabinets in the Cartners’ combined closet and laundry room. The Cartners declined to disclose specific costs, but Mr. Walker estimates that the cabinetry for a similar laundry room would cost about $35,000. Like other builders, Mr. Walker says laundry rooms are getting bigger and better, with storage space for Costco runs and gift wrap, charging stations for electronics and custom cabinetry.

Above all, today’s laundry rooms are making it easier to do laundry. In high-end homes, laundry rooms now often come with multiple washers and dryers, lots of counter space for sorting or folding, and custom drying racks. Homeowners are asking for laundry chutes and smart appliances that they can control from the office. Laundry lovers—or those who hate it enough to want the job done with maximum efficiency—build in space for steaming cabinets or rotary irons that press tableware and bed linens within minutes.

“Why did I get it? To save me time,” says Stan Hardman of Los Angeles, who recently ventured to the Miele showroom in Beverly Hills to buy a $3,000 professional steam rotary iron. Plus, “you can treat yourself to Waldorf Astoria-like pillowcases,” he says.

The machine, which looks like an old-fashioned wringer-style washer mangle with a wide roller and foot pedal, makes it easier to keep Mr. Hardman’s California king-size sheets wrinkle-free and neatly creased.

It also rapidly irons his underwear, flattening briefs so that they take up less drawer space. Doing a week’s ironing takes two hours, far less than before, says 64-year-old Mr. Hardman, a retired airplane-parts manufacturing executive. The white rotary iron now complements his charcoal-black washing machine and fire-engine-red dryer.

Laundry rooms are a priority for home buyers. The space topped a list of “most wanted” features in a survey published in March by the National Association of Homebuilders. Around 92% of respondents found a laundry room more important than features such as an outside patio or table space for eating in the kitchen.

When Cierra and Kevin Buchwald built their six-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot house in the Woodlands, Texas, in 2013, they asked home builder Darling Homes, a unit of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Taylor Morrison, to revise the floor plan and turn one of three upstairs bathrooms in their house plan into an extra laundry room. Son Blake, 13, kept his own bathroom, but daughters Delaynie, 10, Adelyn, 8, now share for the convenience of a second laundry area.

“I don’t want to be running up and down the stairs with their stuff,” says Ms. Buchwald, a 39-year-old stay-at-home mother.

Another benefit: While the main laundry room adjoins the master closet and a hallway off the kitchen, the upstairs one is near the media room. There, Ms. Buchwald takes baskets of laundry for folding and ironing while watching “The Real Housewives of New York City” and other digitally recorded shows. Between the kids’ soccer, dance, gymnastics, golf and fishing clothes, Ms. Buchwald does at least eight loads of laundry a week, half of them upstairs. “Eventually, I want them to do their own laundry,” she hopes.

Oregonians Russell and Michelle Long would have liked a small washer and dryer in every bedroom suite of their 6,300-square-foot, seven-bedroom house in Eugene. But the Longs, who have four children and often host exchange students, feared that smaller units could not handle the family’s large loads of laundry. “You can’t throw 13 pairs of jeans in there,” says Mr. Long, 43. “If you have kids and a pool, you need to be able to wash a lot of clothes and towels at once.”

Instead, the couple installed two washers and two dryers made by LG Electronics Inc.with the biggest capacity they could find. When remodeling the laundry room as part of a house extension in 2011, Mr. Long, who owns a company called Aloha Home Builders, also designed farmhouse-style cabinetry and backsplashes, with shelves to display his wife’s antique oil lamps inherited from her great-great aunt and glass jars filled with detergent and old-fashioned clothespins.

“It’s my favorite room in the house now,” says 45-year-old Ms. Long, a designer for crafts company Stampin’ Up. The double appliances have halved the time she spends on laundry, to around eight hours a week.

Now Ms. Long can do on a Saturday what used to take an entire weekend. “It’s so fast, so efficient,” she says.

To that end, LG Electronics, based in South Korea, has high expectations for its “twin wash” system: Launched in January, the front-load washing machines sit on a pedestal that contains a second washer for smaller loads or delicates. Depending on the model, they retail for between $1,500 and $2,580.

Likewise, Germany-based Miele is preparing to introduce “the Anywhere Dryer” in the fall of 2017. This stackable unit can be placed in any closet or corner because it doesn’t require ductwork leading to an outside dryer vent. The company is considering an $1,800 price tag.

As laundry rooms move up in the house, looks are getting more important. In the laundry room of their 3,600-square-foot, six-bedroom home outside Edmonton, Alberta, Dawn and Mark Asbell used the same slate flooring as on the rest of the ground floor and outside deck. The room’s taupe-colored cabinets mirror those in the kitchen. The idea, says Don Zwarych, co-owner of Vancouver-based Zwada home Interiors & Design, which led the 2009 project, was to create flow and consistency throughout the house.

Ms. Asbell also has a double set of washers and dryers, wraparound counter space and a sink with an old-fashioned washboard for scrubbing. Five kids, three of them still at home, busy with sports and sometimes forgetful of hanging up towels, help amass 20 to 25 loads of laundry a week. An attractive, high-performance laundry room makes the chore more enjoyable, says Ms. Asbell, 51. In all, the laundry-room project cost an estimated $14,000.

In the laundry room of her own chateau-style home in Dallas, interior designer and author Betty Lou Phillips maximized form and function. Two sets of washers and dryers, a pull-out drying rack and a Miele rotary iron have pink walls as a backdrop, as well as two chandeliers and a wall of custom cubby holes for wicker laundry baskets, each lined with pink cotton and white Belgian lace.

The cubbies have labels, such as “bed linens” and “table linens,” hand-painted by Houston artist Allan Rodewald. The artist also painted pink hearts on a piggy bank, placed on a washer for change left in pockets.

“Doing laundry is a mundane task,” says Ms. Phillips, who was unable to give the cost of the project. “I wanted to give the room a look that was anything but mundane.”

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