Samsung AirDresser is a dry-cleaning closet for rich people – CNET

You already have a closet, but now Samsung wants you to have another. Meet the AirDresser. Available this April for $1,400 (about £1,070 or AU$2,040), it’s a freestanding closet-within-a-closet that cleans and straightens your clothes after you hang them up and walk away. Similar to the LG Styler and the lower-end, now discontinued Whirlpool Swash home dry cleaning appliances, the idea is you hang your shirts, dress pants, sweaters, and delicates inside these devices, which then use a heating or steaming process to clean them. 

The AirDresser should appeal to well-heeled business types who have a need to wear finicky clothing that’s a chore to regularly steam, iron or dry clean. The fact that AirDresser lives alongside your clothes, and not in the laundry room or at the cleaners, is wildly convenient, a fact that Samsung has been quick to note. Samsung says you don’t need a lot of space to install one — or a separate water line.

At an expected retail price of $1,400, the AirDresser sits at a much higher price point than the $500 Swash, introduced in 2014. That said, it’s significantly less expensive than LG’s Styler, which debuted at $1,999 shortly after the Swash. The AirDresser appears closest to the Styler in terms of its design and target consumer.

Imagine the exec that spends a lot of time on the road, but perhaps isn’t high enough on the corporate food chain to have been awarded an assistant to handle menial life tasks such as doing the laundry or stopping by the dry cleaner. Business hotels that cater to that clientele are also a target market.

Samsung has packed a lot of capital letter features into the AirDresser. A JetAir system and Air Hangers buffet your clothes with fast moving air. The Air Hangers set it apart from the competition, Samsung claims, because they’re designed with a hollow center so steam and heat can treat your smelly garments from the inside — as well as the outside. 

The Jet Steam system sanitizes and various dryers and filters round out the experience on the cleaning side. But this device also works with SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform. In addition to the AirDresser’s subtle built-in display, where you can select your cycle and turn the clothes steamer on or off straight from the device, you can further customize your settings in the SmartThings app. Specifically, you can tell the app what types of clothes you’re planning to put in the AirDresser — say a sweater, a blouse and a sport coat — and it will tell you if you should actually run all three different fabrics in the same cycle. (Spoiler: You shouldn’t. The sweater needs more heat than the blouse or sport coat.) 

How well the AirDresser actually works is still unknown, but I know a dress shirt that’s dying to try it out. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait much longer; the AirDresser is expected to hit stores this spring.