I believe yes, you can store them in a chest. But no, you will have to remove them from the chest and put them in either your bank or inventory when you wish to use them.
However, if you have a crafting station at your house, it may work from the chest. perhaps someone knows this for sure?
If you do multiple alts, you can research on alts to get rid of inventory space and when your crafter has room for the next research have the alt craft the trait item. I did this in the beginning splitting my researches on 3 characters so I always have the traits on hand without needing so much mule space. When my crafter researches were done, I made trait items at my leisure to research them.
Sorry, I meant the housing editor thingie. That's the only thing that will pull stuff (furniture) from chests. Regular items have to be removed from chests before the crafting stations will register them, either in your inventory or bank.
Yes, you can store items that are needed for crafting in a chest, but none of the crafting station will "see" those items.
Crafting stations can only "see" your bank & current logged character inventory.
If crafting station had access to your hosing storage, there would be no problem with inventory management. But apparently ZOS prefers to ignore the problem (max bank space, 240 slots, was not touched since the game launched in 2014) and forces people to buy ESO+ to "fix" the problem.
Since they did not have touched it for SO long, I do believe it is intended. Introduce a problem & then sell a solution for it...
note: 240 slots is way to low in the current game. If you were to keep bare minimum, only one stack of top tier crafting mats + motif mats it would be something like 250 slots needed. I could understand that, if I only had base game, but I pretty much have all chapters & story DLCs... and no way to upgrade bank, other than pay monthly "extortion" to have normal game play experience...
Edited by Tommy_The_Gun on October 29, 2019 2:24PM
I would recommend against doing this. Its so easy to get items for research that you don't need to stockpile them in chests. You most certainly will get them again.
I agree with @El_Borracho except if the trait is hard to find and expensive to buy. For example, some jewelry traits are harder to come across than others, and if you search guild stores for them they are expensive. But with common traits you might as well deconstruct the items or sell them, because they're usually very inexpensive to buy.