Are you sick of “over-the-door” towel hangers that always bang against the door, and you’re also forbidden from drilling holes to install proper hooks? Read on for an overcomplicated theoretical solution to your woes!

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Background:

One common feature in terrible dorm rooms and outdated rental units is the over-the-door towel hanger (Figure 1), which is a practical yet annoying way of adding hooks to a door without having to drill holes into the door.

Fig. 1: A staple of the “bad rental unit” bathroom door, the over-the-door hanger is good in theory, but it’s almost impossible to hang in a way that the hooks don’t loudly “thwack” into the door every time it closes.

The Issue:

These over-the-door hangers are finicky to hang just right, and tend to have two major downsides:

  • It’s hard to find a hanger with exactly the same thickness as the door. Any hanger-vs-door thickness mismatch will cause the hanger to wobble around whenever the door is closed.
  • The top-of-the-door part of the hanger tends to saw into the doorframe over time. This causes your rental unit to look EVEN WORSE, and increases the change that your landlord will try to keep your security deposit.

Realistically, these over-the-door hangers cause a lot more damage than just drilling a couple of tiny holes for normal hooks would, but they’re popular because they seem non-destructive (i.e. “renter-friendly”) and can be installed without tools.

Proposal:

If the hanger could be made infinitely thin and inflexible, then the problems above would disappear.

We should be able to accomplish this with real-world materials by designing a new type of hanger that consists of a ribbon-like material that wraps around the entire door vertically (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: This proposed “around the door” towel hanger consists of a ribbon that wraps around the entire door. Hooks can be added to one (or both) sides of the ribbon by simply clamping a specially-designed metal hook onto the ribbon. Because the material is much thinner, it won’t saw into the doorframe. And because it’s some kind of heavy-duty fabric instead of metal, it shouldn’t chip away the paint like a metal hanger would.

Practical Prototyping:

The main problem with this “around the door” hanger is that it needs to be an exact fit to a specific door. Fortunately, this is possible by using an existing product: the ratcheting tie-down strap (https://www.google.com/search?q=ratcheting+tie-down+straps). All we need to make this product a reality is to put a ratcheting tie-down strap on a door, sew some towel hooks onto it, and hang a towel! Easy peasy.

PROS: Provides a new use of ratcheting tie-down straps, thus making it more likely that my heavy financial investment in the “Ratcheting Tie-Down Strap Top 500 US Market” index fund will finally pay off.

CONS: The fabric might still be too flexible, in which case the hooks will still loudly bang against the door every time it’s closed, in which case we’re basically back where we started.

Thanks to M. Y. for this design idea.

Originally published 2026-09-28.