A beautiful, modern crate
Daniela Gorny, a careful editor on the Wirecutter home decor team, recommended using crates, either vintage finds at thrift stores or inexpensive IKEA options, to hide unsightly routing. Tracy Vence, editor-in-chief of the Wirecutter’s health and fitness team, personally uses the more expensive Hay Recycled Color Crate, and we tested it to see how it would affect their Wi-Fi connection.
We found that the crate has plenty of room for both the router and the cable modem (if you have one), and feeding the cables through the crate’s handles is easy. The grates on the walls of the crate are too small for the Ethernet connector to fit in, and the routing may still be slightly visible on the slats, but the vents that pierce the sides of the crate and its open surface ensure excellent ventilation for your electronics.
When we tested the router inside the crate, the crate’s recycled polypropylene materials had little effect on Wi-Fi signals; the router continued to stream 4K videos and offered fast downloads to laptops throughout our test home.
Rustic wicker basket
Some Wirecutter users prefer to hide their routers in wire baskets for good looks. We tested an affordable Wicker Laundry Basket from Best Products that was large enough to hold both the router and the modem. Since its sides were over 11 inches long, it could easily hide our router, which is 6 inches high with its extended antennas. The knitting yarn was tight, but we slipped the yarn into its weave with little effort. That basket is discontinued, but Best Choice Products makes the same hyacinth baskets as the ottoman.
When we tested the router sitting in a wicker basket, the container had little effect on Wi-Fi signals. If you decide to hide your router in a wicker basket, don’t put anything like absorbent cloth or books on top, to let the heat of the router escape naturally.
A bamboo box with holes
Caroline Mullen, staff writer for our organizing and cleaning team, hides her track in an IKEA Smarra box with a lid. When Caroline hid her router from Smarra, she had to cut a hole for the wires because of the strong bamboo weave of the box. The box looks great with the lid closed, and it fits our router just fine, but it might be too big to accommodate a large modem.
The closed basket had some impact on performance, especially when we hit the router with heavy traffic from multiple laptops at the same time. The router felt warm after the test, which suggests that overheating was possible and could be causing the slowdown. That said, the performance drop we measured was minimal: You’ll have to time your downloads with a stopwatch to see the difference.
