Nate Berkus's genius clothes folding trick is the one-way ticket to a more organized closet

Raluca Racasan

Wed, November 15, 2023 at 6:30 AM UTC

3 min read

Nate berkus in front of a desk with interior design materials.

Nate Berkus’s social media is a fountain of knowledge for small but super-effective hacks to achieve an impeccably tidy, organized, and beautiful home. In his latest Instagram post, the interior designer shares a new idea for anyone looking to beautify their closet. Encouraged by the love his audience showed for his belt storage trick, he declares a new series on how to fold - well - everything, but first up, it’s tricky sweatpants.

If you're looking for closet organization inspo, Nate’s dressing room looks is a thing of dreams. It features neat shelves of color-coordinated shirts, shoes, jumpers, and perfectly folded sweatpants. But the issue with this latter piece of clothing, the designer says, is that the seam in between the legs always sticks out when folded. Here’s how he overcomes this problem, and why it's a one-way ticket to a more organized closet.

Nate Berkus’s sweatpant folding trick

Nate Berkus is no stranger to organizing. Besides all his tips on wider design, we've praised his home hacks (see his belt storage trick) for helping us curate a space that's quite literally perfect. Nate’s love for folding things neatly seems to know no boundaries, and neither does his audience's appetite for it.

‘Apparently, I’m a great folder,’ he says on his latest Instagram reel, and who doesn’t agree? In this new post, he confesses that even he finds sweatpants tricky to fold because of the seam in between the legs which makes it difficult to get them into a neat square.

‘The sweatpant never goes well in the drawer, you can’t organize them well,’ he says going on to demonstrate his pant folding trick. ‘You take the sweatpants, fold them in half, then this is the tricky part.' Here he's referring to the aforementioned tricky seam, which he folds in for a clean edge. 'You then fold it again and again so what you have is a little brick without the side sticking out,' he adds. 'And then it goes right in the drawer.' Voila! As simple and efficient as that.

If you don’t like folding items with tricky shapes, do this instead

Just like sweatpants, there are numerous other items that we all find tricky to fold. If you’re not as conscientious as Nate or simply don’t want to dedicate the time to neat folding, there is a cheat. Home organizing expert Shira Gill told me a method that she uses on fitted sheets, but you can use it with other items that are tricky to fold too, and still have a wardrobe that looks well organized.

‘I’m terrible at folding fitted sheets,' she says. 'I think they're terrible to fold into a neat package. Years ago I invested in beautiful linen cloth bins so I just put a whole bedding set in per bin, and so it looks lovely. Honestly, I can just dump it all in, but it has the aesthetic of being beautifully organized even though I am just dumping my ball of linens in pretty bins.'

We love these fabric storage bins from Wayfair, and you can easily adopt the same method with sweatpants. Use this storage idea for any item you simply don’t want to fold while still achieving tidy and satisfying shelves - win win!