A high-tech load

Now ask yourself this: Have you decorated the laundry room lately?

Forget concrete cellar floors and bare light bulbs. The laundry room, once a dull afterthought of the home, has gone upstairs and upscale.

Perhaps you weren't paying attention to this heady new trend, but on the evolutionary scale of high-end home design, it emerged fairly recently, sometime after the family room became a home theater and the mudroom started doubling as a potting shed.

These days, think laundry ''center'' or ''family studio,'' the term Whirlpool favors for its clothes-care system, which includes a ''sink spa,'' ''ironing station,'' ''drying cabinet,'' and Personal Valet ''clothes vitalizing'' system.

Think granite countertops for folding clean towels, and $3,500 European washer-dryer sets. Think multiple laundry rooms, one on each floor, to minimize laundry basket schlepping. Think fine, custom-built cabinetry to hold the laundry soap. Wait! Don't think laundry soap at all: You'll be wanting ''Spa Treatment'' laundry detergents with aromatherapy scents, and while you're at it, don't forget the $17.50 fabric softenerfrom Williams-Sonoma or the $10 linen spray from Caldrea.

Then, to get the picture right, think of David Kane, a designer and builder who not only builds such laundry rooms but owns one. A year ago, Kane, who specializes in high-end, one-of-a kind construction, built himself a 4,000-square-foot, U-shaped house in Weston with a master bedroom that adjoins a conservatory, looks out on a pool and private gardens, and features a dressing room equipped with its own stunning laundry center. It boasts floor-to-ceiling cherry cabinets and hidden hampers for whites, darks, and dry cleaning. It has a Miele Novotronic front-loading washer; a Miele dryer with electronic sensors to determine moisture levels in the laundry; and the piece de resistance, a Miele rotary iron, the ironing appliance formerly known as a mangle. It's operated with a foot pedal, so Kane's housekeeper, who does most of the laundry, can sit down while ironing.

"Look at how perfect it is," said Kane, running a T-shirt through the machine's wide roller, after spritzing it first with Williams-Sonoma lavender-scented ironing water. "You won't believe how sheets feel. Of course, the 1,010 thread count helps."

From Beacon Hill brownstones to suburban McMansions, laundry rooms are the new playrooms of the house, deliberately integrated into the home's living quarters and design schemes, often with the assistance of a decorator and architect, or both. Last month, when 25 Boston-area designers pooled their resources and created the lavish Tara Drive Showhouse in Norwell in the former Ralph Tedeschi mansion, a highlight of the showhouse -- besides the dog spa and gift-wrapping station -- was a main-floor gourmet laundry room with wainscotting, a honed Cambrian black granite countertop, handmade ceramic tiles, concrete sink with antiqued polished nickel faucets, and a miniature ladies' English slipper chair. Plus, it had the same trendy washer-dryer set that David Kane owns, the super-capacity German Miele Novotronic duo that retails for upward of $3,000.

"Just because a laundry room is functional doesn't mean it can't be beautiful," said Barbara Bahr Sheehan of Norwell, who designed it.

It can also be a status symbol. "You have these high-end laundry appliances, why not show them off and let your friends and neighbors see them?" said Leslie Redford, spokesperson for GE Consumer Products. Last summer, the company launched the GE Profile Harmony Clothes Care System, a washer and dryer that electronically communicate with each other; the washer delivers load information to the dryer, which automatically chooses a setting. The appliances also sport "an all-new color: dark platinum, like a new car color, with a shimmer to it," said Redford. "It's totally different from that old, boring, white box you are used to seeing in the basement in that dark corner."

Some think the high-end appliances are actually fueling the laundry room decorating rage, the way built-in refrigerators and professional ovens did with kitchens. (The hot names in washers and dryers at this hour are Miele, Bosch, and Maytag Nepture, according to Steve Sheinkopf, sales director of Yale Appliance and Lighting in Boston. "Front loading," "touch screen" "energy efficient," and " "high spin speed" are other key buzz words.) "It's not that unusual to design a laundry room around your washer and dryer," said William Hellow, a New York architect who designs laundry rooms in high-end Manhattan homes.

The compact Bosch washer and dryer were the appliances of choice for the laundry room Oliver Bouchier of Payne/Bouchier built in the Beacon Hill townhouse he just renovated; it was once the home of noted 19th-century architect Asher Benjamin. The laundry room, set off the master bedroom, was designed by Hickox Williams Architects of Boston, and no details were spared in its design and construction, despite its pedestrian function.

"We made a conscious effort to have the details relate to the original Asher Benjamin Greek Revival details," said architect Patrick Hickox. The walls are painted in a soft, historic peach color. The millwork detailing was replicated to match the existing casing in the rest of the house. (It was inspired by Benjamin's original drawings in a book he published in 1830.) The cabinets are set at interesting hexagonal angles.

"Now this is of interest," says Bouchier, a tweedy English contractor, offering a visitor a tour of the laundry room. "These are butt hinges as opposed to European hinges." The brushed nickel hinges, he said, which are visible on the surface of the cabinets, are more historically accurate than the European style.

The range of design possibilities for laundry rooms seems infinite. In Needham, contractor Dan Tibma remodelled his house recently and added a U-shaped laundry room off the kitchen with a "sorting area" and speckled cut-glass Corian counter tops. In Lincoln, it took the combined efforts of Cambridge architect Darin Mardock of Design Associates Inc. and the Boston-based Manuel de Santaren design firm to design Linda Hammett Ory's laundry room in her restored 1782 Lincoln farmhouse. It features Georgian Colonial molding, a pull-out ironing board, sleek white subway tiles, and two large windows looking out on an orchard, tall pines, and a barn.

"The focal point is definitely the laundry sink," said Mardock, who located an antique cast-iron tub for the room and commissioned a custom-made polished chrome base for it. "The Chicago faucet's pretty cool too. It's wall-mounted and retro to give the overall feeling the house is not a brand-new house. It's an older house that's evolved over time."

Sometimes one laundry room just isn't enough, especially if you own a 6,000-square-foot house and have four athletic sons, as Paula Gallagher does. She and her husband built a Tudor-style, three-story home in Winchester last year, with two fully equipped laundry rooms -- one in the basement near the pool, one upstairs outside the exercise room.

"We're all hitting the midlife point now," said Gallagher. "We're thinking about those stairs."

Certainly, there are pragmatic reasons why laundry rooms have become a more integral part of the house.

"People have figured out that you can put the laundry room where you generate the laundry," said Sheinkopf of Yale Appliance and Lighting. "It's more practical to have it right where you need it than to go down four flights of stairs and listen for a buzzer you'll never hear."

Obviously, there are other forces at work, too.

"I think the toys are better," said Monica Nassif, author of "Laundry: The Spirit of Keeping Home" (Chronicle Books) and founder of The Caldrea Company, which manufactures "aromatherapeutic" cleaning products. She also believes that, paradoxically, some of the momentum for more upscale laundry rooms has been generated by conservationists and the Green movement, which appreciates high-efficiency appliances and natural, biodegradable cleaning products (such as Caldrea's $15 Fabric Softener, with natural cotton extract and essential oils of geranium and clover).

She believes aesthetically pleasing laundry rooms also appeal to overstressed homemakers who find that doing laundry, a chore that previous generations found mind-numbingly tedious, has certain "meditative" qualities associated with it.

Also, some homeowners have decided "it's uncivilized to go down to the basement," said architect Hickox, which is why they choose to build laundry rooms near their bedrooms.

"Some parents, as they get on, lose their enthusiasm for being mixed in with the life of the children," he said. "They want a realm that's always tidy and always serene. The more evolved parental units have decided to go back to their idealized, pre-child existence where, at least for a couple of years, they had a neat, tidy world before the agents of entropy came in."