By KATHRYN WEXLER

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

It certainly wasn't what Virginia Woolf had in mind.

When the writer coined the famous phrase, "A room of one's own," in a lecture at Cambridge in 1928, she was addressing a woman's need for space if her intellectual life was to flourish.

Well, Ginny, we got the room, all right--though it's usually just a cubical.

Today we need a new type of room of our own. A place for quiet reflection and self-actualization before we log on to a hyper-connected world.

Hello, closet!

A closet is where lovers aren't welcome, where children shouldn't play and where even maids have very little business. It's a place to hide secrets, savor flimsy, lovely things or unhook a work-a-day uniform.

It's a sacred space.

Hello Campos went one better. When she built her Miami house, she turned her closet into a fortress.

"It's a hurricane shelter," said Campos, perched on the moving ladder she uses to reach the second story of her walk-in closet--one of two, actually. "It's all concrete."

The upper tier is where she keeps formal gowns and luggage. It's also where she stores the mink, fox and chinchilla, cooled by an air-conditioning vent a few inches away.

Down below are the gossamer blouses, the Dolce & Gabbana getups.

"I'm very proud of my closet because I feel happy when I look for things," said Campos, originally from Brazil.

As it turns out, bad weather has never caused her to hunker down among her beloved boots and bags. But sometimes she takes shelter there anyway.

"If I'm a little blue, hours and hours. I try things on, I put them here," she said, gesturing to a shelf. "I try other things "

The closet off Saskia Galliano-Touret's bedroom can't honestly be called a closet.

Really it's a boudoir, a place meant for primping, bathing and basking in the cherry-hued light that stained glass windows throw across the Opera Fantastico marble floor.

But it wasn't for glory that Touret built the space.

"It's supposed to be a nice, cozy, little place," said Touret. "My husband has his office. My office is my bathroom. It's where I keep my sanity."