What Ever Happened to Laundry Chutes?

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they’ll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something—or someone—got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren’t designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics—easier identifiers of a home’s dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?

One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."

While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and ’20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices—gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines—intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late ’30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.

By the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, laundry chutes—along with other built-in conveniences—were incorporated into cottages, bungalows, and other compact houses for the middle- and working-classes. Another reason for this, according to James A. Jacobs, architectural historian and author of Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia, was that there was a prevailing idea at that time that stairs were treacherous. "Even after World War II, there was a lot of advocacy for one-floor houses, not just because people thought they were modern, but they eliminated dangerous stairs," he explains. As one man who installed a laundry chute in his house put it in a 1947 story in American Home: "I hated to see my wife struggling with armloads of dirty clothes. I shuddered at the thought that she might trip and break her neck tottering down the stairs."

Laundry chutes weren’t limited to new builds: in existing homes, they were "so easily built into the walls, between studs," according to a 1931 article in American Builder. Tutorials in home design magazines like House Beautiful walked readers through the installation process, which often involved creating one on the floor of a ground-floor linen closet.

Countless laundry chutes were introduced into existing American homes in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to an amendment to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 that introduced a plan through which homeowners could get insured loans of up to $2,000 to make specific upgrades to their homes, including installing built-in laundry and coal chutes, cupboards, broom closets, and garbage receptacles.

Send it down the chute

During the height of their popularity in the first part of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to have more than one laundry chute in a home. The devices were most commonly placed in hallways near the main bathroom, although they could also be found inside linen closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, and even kitchen cabinets. Either way, the chute emptied into a receptacle in the basement, keeping unsightly dirty clothes out of the living quarters. In the 1920s, some of these hampers were nailed into the joists so they didn’t touch the floor and had small cages built around them, Jacobs says. This kept the laundry off the filthy basement floor, and prevented the person doing the laundry from having to bend down as much.

In addition to laundry chutes, some homes built in the first part of the 20th century also had dust chutes—hidden trap doors built into baseboards or the floor itself where you could sweep dirt and dust to make it disappear into a sack in the basement. Similarly, coal chutes were used to transport coal into the basement of a house without having to expose the living space to the filthy fuel. Along the same lines, trash chutes became popular features of apartment buildings (and still are).

A sanitary and safer solution

Laundry chutes were likely first introduced in hotels, hospitals, and other institutions that housed many people and required a large amount of linens, like bedsheets and towels. The feature was not only convenient, but also thought to be more sanitary, as people believed that unwashed laundry was contaminated with disease-causing germs. In her 1863 book Notes on Hospitals, British nurse, statistician, and social reformer Florence Nightingale recommends that hospitals build "foul-linen shoots" into the wall in order to whisk dirty laundry away from wards as quickly as possible. Although Nightingale called for laundry chutes made of glazed earthenware pipes, the first residential laundry chutes were primarily made of wood, Jacobs explains. But within a few decades, the natural material fell out of favor because splintered wood could snag clothing, and, more importantly, it could help a fire in the basement spread to the upstairs living area, and vice versa.

During the "sanitation craze" of the early 20th century, wooden laundry chutes were seen as unsanitary, as the material’s grains and cracks could harbor dirt, dust, and germs. By the 1920s, trade journals typically recommended installing laundry chutes made of aluminum sheeting or glass. Aluminum became the material of choice for laundry chutes, as it was practical, affordable, and, when used with a fireproof door, less prone to spreading fires.

A step forward for homemakers

Domestic scientist Catharine Beecher recommended laying out a home in a way that would "save many steps"—and therefore cut down on the amount of time needed for housework—as early as 1841. A few decades later, the same concept was used to market laundry chutes to housewives.

Home and women’s magazines like House & Garden, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal ran articles throughout the 1910s and ’20s extolling laundry chutes as a way to cut down on the number of steps women had to take while doing laundry. The feature was even referenced in a 1915 McCall’s article titled "How Suffragists Keep House"—because when you’re fighting for the right to vote, you don’t have time to waste collecting and carrying dirty laundry down to the basement.

"This is all in line with the American creed of efficiency which gives more leisure as a reward for speedier methods of accomplishing work," reads a 1928 Modern Mechanics article about "the handy dust chute," described as "a counterpart to the laundry chute idea." Building catalogs from the 1910s through the ’50s listed laundry chutes as home features women in particular would find desirable, as they "lessen the burdens of the housewife," one 1922 volume put it.

The laundry chute’s last hurrah came in the 1950s, when "homemaking" was still a cultural priority, and postwar suburban homes—like bungalows, ranches with basements, and two-story colonial-style houses—were designed and marketed with housewives in mind, Hubka explains. "It was perfect for the advertisement of the independent woman who is married to a good businessman husband and being an efficient homemaker," he says.

But within a decade, society shifted: household efficiency was no longer a top priority, and by the mid-1960s, the popularity of laundry chutes began to wane, Hubka says. The 1970s saw a new trend in residential architecture: cutting costs wherever possible. Houses built in the ’70s weren’t all that different spatially from those constructed in the ’60s, but thanks to inflation, simpler rooms and layouts, and cheaper materials, became increasingly favored, Jacobs explains. "In the 1970s, inflation stamped out every extra you can imagine in a house," he says. "So, if you’re looking to economize, you may not include a laundry chute in your plans."

Though the economy eventually bounced back, the popularity of laundry chutes did not. They didn’t disappear completely, but instead of being standard, they were now something homeowners had to request when building a new home—and most people decided that the convenient feature wasn’t worth the additional expense, or the space required to install one. "It’s a reasonable amount of space to give up," Jacobs says. "If you have a laundry chute going through your kitchen and eliminated that, you could create a pantry."

The laundry chute’s downfall

Interestingly, American houses have only gotten bigger since the laundry chute went out of style. From 1975 to 2023, the average square footage of a new single-family home in the U.S. increased substantially, from 1,660 to 2,514 square feet. While this means there’s now more space to spare—and longer distances to carry laundry—laundry chutes are nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were. One possible explanation is that larger homes allow for the laundry area to move up in the world, from the basement to a dedicated room or closet upstairs. This has also become more of an option as laundry equipment has gotten cleaner, quieter, and more compact.

Still, if a home with two or more stories has a ground-floor laundry room, why not have a chute leading there? Jacobs suspects it may have to do with the fact that we no longer view stairs as a significant threat to our safety. Or it could be the stairs themselves: the widespread adoption of carpeted floors in American homes starting in the ’50s probably made carrying laundry down a plush staircase between a home’s levels feel less daunting than the prior option of navigating open-riser steps to the basement.

It may also have to do with the strain of high housing costs, both for living and building. "Laundry chutes are really hard to program sensibly into a [house] plan," Jacobs says. "You have to stack them up in a smart way where it’s in a logical place on each floor—that’s not easy."

Or maybe it’s just that priorities have shifted. While middle-class homes from the first half of the 20th century were all about efficiency and built-in conveniences, the 1980s ushered in the era of the McMansion. Many houses built during this period opted for ostentatious amenities—like a pool, two-story foyer, or rec room—over more practical and less-flashy features, like laundry chutes, which are literally hidden with the ductwork. Even following the financial collapse in 2008, when sprawling McMansions gave way to more reasonably sized tract housing—most of these homes with limited floor plan options lacked the convenient features of their mid-20th-century predecessors.

Laundry chutes haven’t entirely disappeared from our cultural imagination, but in our homes, even contemporary iterations—like the Laundry Jet, which transports laundry between rooms with a vacuum-powered chute—haven’t taken off. Perhaps we’ve lived without laundry chutes long enough that we’ll forever view them as more nostalgic than necessary.

Top photo by Adrian Sherratt/Alamy

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