2 story homes, with the owner's suite on the main floor (sometimes referred to as 1½ story) and secondary bedrooms upstairs, present a natural dilemma-laundry. You want the laundry facilities conveniently located on the main floor. But retrieving dirty clothes from upstairs...well, that often leads to anguish over not having certain clothes clean! Consider a laundy chute!
Laundry chutes are not a new idea, but they're not found in many new homes either. Unless you are planning both an upstairs laundry for the kids plus a washer/dryer on the main floor, designing in a laundry chute may be an amenity you'll wonder how you would have ever lived without. Just be sure to have a self-closing door on one end (for fire safety.)
See some great laundry chute
ideas.