Shoe Housing: Past, Present, Future?

I love shoes, you love shoes, we all love shoes! But as you build up a collection of shoes it can get harder and harder to find room to house them. Traditionally shoes go on the floor of a closet but there is only so much useable floor space in a home before you start carpeting your house with shoes. I'm very lucky with where I'm living right now - I live with a girlfriend who also has a good amount of shoes so we have a room dedicated to our shoes! It's supposed to be an eating area off of our kitchen but since we have a substantial dining room and it's just the two of us, this seemed like a better use of space. It also leads to our balcony so there is some stellar lighting in there. 

Our shoe room consists of a giant full length mirror at the end of the room, two 50 pair racks on either side of it (one for each of us naturally) and at the other end of the room we have two red bucket chairs with a table in the middle facing the mirror (which we've used to showcase our shoes at our shoe parties). It's a good little area.

But recently, I ran into a bit of a problem. My shoe rack started to buckle. Not just because I have too many shoes (just kidding, there's no such thing as too many shoes) but because I put my boots on the top rack which weighs it down quite a bit as you can imagine. I should also mention that less than 24 hours after I took the buckling picture below, it full out collapsed. So, I had to go out and find myself a new rack. Which I did. I picked up the stainless steel beauty also seen below.

Now I will say I am quite happy with this new rack and how it turned out. It holds just as many shoes as the other one but is more visually pleasing and also, for whatever reason, feels more compact to me. BUT I am still worlds away from the shoe housing of my dreams - hopefully, the shoe housing of my future...

The dream.

My dream is to still have a house with a shoe room/closet but to have white shelving  house all of my shoes. A step further would be to have that white shelving inset into the wall but that I realize, is quite ambitious. I previously posted about Coach's shoe closet which would be a dream. I've also expressed not just that I would like to have Jennifer Hudson's closet, but that I would be happy live in it - it would be more than enough space for little 'ol me and my clothes and shoes, haha! Her closet is a little off the charts but SO amazing.

How do you store your shoes? Do you have any shoe closet dreams of your own? :)