The closet has become the new frontier of home design and changed the way we buy, store, think about, and even wear our clothes. That’s what I discovered when I asked some Sarasota clotheshorses to let their closets come out of the closet. What they showed me were incredibly revealing personal spaces that are used for recreation, contemplation, experimentation and pure fun. But before we get to them, let me explain why I’m trying to catch up with the trend.

I grew up spending summer and winter vacations in my grandmother’s old Florida house in Palm Beach. My room had a closet with a louvered door that was hard to open, and it was packed to the ceiling with mystery boxes of many sizes. They were filled with my grandmother’s purchases from a lifetime of travels abroad that she never used and never would—but was committed to keeping ’til death did them part.

On rainy winter mornings she’d take us kids on a prolonged safari into those boxes. Boxes with filigree jewelry from Spain, pearls from Majorca, long white leather gloves with buttons at the wrist, beaded cashmere sweaters from Hong Kong with names of relatives who’d passed on—Belle, Nannette, Esther. Moroccan leather boxes and copper pots, rococo porcelain and colored Bohemian glass filled the room. When we came to stay, no one ever dreamed of trying to use that closet for clothes.

Our family house on Martha’s Vineyard, which was built for the actress Katherine Cornell in 1937 by Eric Gugler (who also designed the Oval Office at the White House), didn’t have much in the way of storage space, either. The door leading to the master bedroom led into what looked like a closet. There, on pegs, hung our collection of rain slickers and warm jackets. Rubber boots, like the kind Christopher Robin wore, were lined up on a shelf above. Hapless first-time dinner guests, blundering around in the dark looking for a loo, thought they’d mistaken the directions and come to a dead end. It was a good joke. You had to push a wall open at the end to get into the master bedroom. Once there, you’d find a tiny bathroom and an even smaller cedar closet with pegs and shelves enough for clothes in a part of the world where the styles never changed and no one dressed for dinner.

In my smaller bedroom, I had one peg, three shallow shelves and a trunk at the bottom of my bed for my clothes. Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer live there now. Diane didn’t know what my fish poacher was for, and I’m sure she doesn’t go clamming in the flats for lunch like I did. Mike put in air conditioning, but I have no idea what they did about the closets. For many years, my little Sarasota houses had shallow closets with those awful louvered doors, white wire racks like something out of a warehouse, and the same pathetic array of casual clothes I’d had in Massachusetts.

The modern closet has evolved slowly. In Europe there weren’t any until flush toilets came in. Even in the great houses, where wealthy married couples required separate sitting rooms and sometimes separate bedrooms, closets simply didn’t exist. In the New World, settlers used trunks and wall-mounted pegs to store their few possessions. The walk-in closet did not appear until the prosperity after World War II created a demand for new and bigger houses and the mandate to fill them with more things and more clothes and accessories. The beautifully accessorized closet, however, is brand-new. Luxury closets are the happening thing now.

Recently I went on a shopping tour of downtown condos. I had expected to see the miles of granite counter tops and marble floors, spa tubs, separate showers with pulsing jets, even separate toilets for him and her. But I was surprised by an array of closets that were bigger than my first New York apartment.

When I finally bought a condo thus equipped, I wasn’t sure how I was going to use all that space. My new closets are like Madison Avenue boutiques. They’re wood-paneled, with glass doors covering two levels of hanging racks, and they have banks of drawers for intimate apparel and glass-fronted display cabinets for purses and hats and shoes and other things I don’t have many of. All the years of tiny closets put me in the habit of buying only what would fit (the closet) and divesting what I knew I would never wear again. All right, so my wardrobe also got a lot thinner when I grew a little plumper.