How to Fold and Store Towels Without Them Going Musty

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Fold a bath towel in thirds lengthwise, then in half twice. Store towels only when bone dry, on open shelving with air around them, and never stack more than about six high. A cupboard that smells is a storage problem, not a laundry one.

1. Lay the towel flat, long edge towards you. Smooth it -- creases set in the fold and are hard to remove later.
2. Fold it in thirds lengthwise. Bring the top third down, then the bottom third up over it. You now have a long strip about a third the original width.
3. Fold that strip in half, short end to short end.
4. Fold it in half again. The result is a neat rectangle with the finished edge presented and no raw hem showing.

That is the fold used in hotels, and the reason it looks the way it does is the third step: folding in thirds rather than in half puts the hem inside, so the front of the stack is smooth cloth rather than a row of hems.

Rolling looks good on open shelving and in baskets, and it fits more towels into an awkward space. Folding stacks better and creases less.

Neither is better for the towel. The one real caution is that a tightly rolled towel takes much longer to finish drying if it was not completely dry when you rolled it -- and "not completely dry" is the source of nearly every musty linen cupboard.

Three causes, in order of how often they are the actual problem:

• A towel that went in slightly damp. Cotton terry feels dry on the outside while the hem and the fold are still damp. One towel like that in the middle of a stack will make the whole shelf smell within a day.
• No airflow. A closed cupboard in a bathroom holds humid air. The towels absorb it, and a shelf of slightly damp cotton is a slow bacterial culture.
• Stacks too deep. A stack twelve towels high has no air in the middle of it, and the towels at the bottom are compressed so they cannot breathe at all.

1. Bone dry, always. If there is any doubt, give it another twenty minutes in the dryer or an hour on a rail. This is the single most important rule.
2. Stack no more than six high. Beyond that the bottom of the stack is compressed and airless.
3. Open shelving beats a closed cupboard in a bathroom. If the storage has to be closed, leave the door ajar or fit a vent.
4. Do not store towels in the bathroom at all if you can avoid it. A landing cupboard or a bedroom shelf is drier. This is worth more than any other change.
5. Rotate the stack. Take from the bottom, put clean ones on top. Otherwise the same two towels do all the work and the rest sit for years absorbing humidity.

If storage is genuinely tight, the fix is not a better folding technique -- it is different towels. A flat-woven peshtemal folds to roughly a third of the bulk of a terry towel with comparable coverage, and a six-pack takes about the space of two terry bath towels.

Buying a matched set also helps more than it sounds: towels of the same dimensions stack square and use the shelf fully, where a shelf of mismatched sizes wastes an inch at every edge. More on peshtemals, and how many of each you need.

• Do not add scented sachets or dryer sheets to the shelf. They mask a smell rather than fixing it, and the fragrance transfers to towels that then smell of perfume rather than of nothing.
• Do not store towels in plastic boxes or vacuum bags long term. Cotton needs to breathe; sealed cotton develops a stale, flat smell within months.
• Do not iron towels. It crushes the pile permanently and reduces absorbency for no benefit.
• Do not store towels with fabric softener still in them. They will not smell, but they will also not absorb -- here is why.