The Entryway Is the Only Room Everyone Uses and Nobody Designs
Every room in a house gets thought about except one. The living room gets a layout. The bedroom gets a color scheme. The kitchen gets agonized over for months.
The entryway gets whatever was left over, which is usually nothing, and yet it is the room with the highest traffic in the building and the only one you use while holding things.
What is actually happening in that space
The entryway has one job and it is a transition. You arrive carrying keys, a bag, a coat, a phone, possibly food, and within about twenty seconds all of it has to go somewhere. You leave and the same things have to be found again in a hurry.
When there is nowhere for those things, they land on the nearest flat surface, which is the floor or the stairs. That is where the pile comes from. It is not untidiness, it is a design gap.
Three objects, in order of impact
Hooks, at the right height. Coats on the floor is a solved problem and the solution costs almost nothing. The mistake people make is a single hook, which loads up into one lump and looks like a repair. A row of three or four plain wall hooks reads as deliberate and actually holds a household's worth of coats.
Height matters more than people think. Standard advice puts them around shoulder height for adults, which is useless for anyone under about four feet. If children live there, a second lower row is what stops their coats living on the floor forever.
One dish for keys, and only keys. A small catchall tray by the door is the single highest-return object in this entire piece, because losing keys is a recurring, time-boxed, high-stress event and this eliminates it in about a week.
The discipline that makes it work: keep it small. A large bowl becomes a junk drawer standing up, and then the keys are in it somewhere under a pile of receipts, which is exactly the problem you were solving.
Somewhere for the small stuff that hangs. If your household runs to bag charms, lanyards, spare keys, or dog leashes, a small tabletop rack on a console gives them individual pegs instead of one tangled clump.
The mistake to avoid
Do not buy furniture. The instinct in a cluttered hallway is a console table or a shoe cabinet, and in a narrow entryway that makes circulation worse and gives the pile a bigger surface to grow on.
Go vertical and small first. If the wall is doing the work, the floor stays clear, and a clear floor is most of what makes an entryway feel like a room rather than a bottleneck.
If drilling is not an option where you live, the trade-offs are in when to just use a screw, which is mostly an argument about why adhesive fails on exactly the things an entryway holds.