Common Questions Answered About Hall Trees

Hall trees are one of the most popular furniture pieces we create for our customers. We’ve been privileged to successfully design and build hall trees that uniquely fit into homes in many States.

Hall trees are most often placed in a mud room, or other front or back entranceway. They are a great spot to quickly hang a coat or jacket, or to grab one when going out the door.

A lot of our customers also use a hall tree to hang their children’s backpacks on so they’re easy to grab on the way to school. As soon as homework is completed, it can go right into the backpack on the hall tree, so it’s less likely to be forgotten when leaving for classes. And coat hooks are a great place to hang the leash for your dog.

One feature everyone loves about hall trees is the bench seat. It’s a convenient place to sit down and quickly remove shoes or boots. The flip-up seat is also a great place to store those shoes or boots.

Flip up Bench seat

Bench storage with Partitions

Flip up bench seat for shallow storage and open cubbies

The bench seat storage area can also be customized. It’s not uncommon for customers to request, for example, certain partitions within the bench’s storage space, depending on their needs. Partitions can help keep that area more organized, especially if multiple items are going to be regularly stored inside it. You could, for example, have your hall tree built with two partitions so it would allow for storage in three separate compartments. We can also make the storage bench with open cubbies, without a flip-up seat, or a combo of open cubbies and shallow bench storage so you could, for example, have a space for your hats or gloves.

Many pet owners like to use hall trees especially for their pet’s food and other accessories. We’ve even custom-built bench seat storage areas to specially accommodate certain sized pet food containers.

The depth of hall trees, from front to back, is typically around 19 inches. This is so they don’t restrict traffic in or out of the entranceway. We have, however, built hall trees with a depth as little as 15 inches and as much as 24 inches.

The height of hall trees generally varies from 72 to 84 inches. The 72-inch models typically include a row of coat hooks at the top. The 84-inch models may include an extra shelf above the row of coat hooks or open cubbies, about 10-inches deep. These are great niche spaces for all kinds of personal items, including anything from gloves to grocery bags.

The smallest side-to-side dimension we ever built a hall tree was 20-inches. (It was for our dear friend Delores, one of our most devoted customers. Farm girl at heart ) The largest hall tree we ever built was 96-inches wide.

Most recently, our hall trees have been taking on a whole new level, by adding side cabinets either on the right or left side. This cabinet generally has its own shelves, with doors, and offers even more storage space inside the piece. Once in a while, one of our customer’s will request that we build a coat bar to fit inside one of these cabinets instead of a shelf.

Shown with coat bar

We’ve also made hall tree side cabinets to fit everything from guns and rifles (for hunters) to laundry detergent. It all depends on what the customer wants.

Some of our customers own horses and they’ve had us design hall trees especially with accessories and supplies in mind relating to the needs of their animals. We built, for example, side cabinets big enough to store saddles, bridles or riding boots.

We generally have standard sizes of hall trees available in our shop for quicker order fulfillment.

These sizes for these are: 

30″W x 72″H x 19″D

40″ W x 72″H x 19″D

54″W x 72″H x 19″D

All of the above generally offer flip-up bench seats and open cubbies. These sizes will also be added to our new DIY page, for anyone who wishes to finish one on their own.

Hall trees can be made from either reclaimed wood or new wood. Old bead-board backing always looks good in the upper area though. The entire hall tree can then be custom stained or painted, depending upon the exact finish desired.

One thing most of our hall tree customers really enjoy is picking out their hardware. We have a variety of recommendations for coat hooks one may choose from. That is always a fun part of creating a unique-looking hall tree.

If you, dear reader, have any further questions about hall trees don’t hesitate to ask. We hope you let us build the perfect hall tree for your home. If you have a design in mind, share it with us. We’d be happy to work with you.