The doors of your home serve an essential function in creating privacy and hiding storage areas, but they can contribute quite a lot to the overall design style as well! The type of door, door construction, and door style all come together to provide another element that helps you create the perfect look in your home as well as giving the right kind of function for you. Understanding these different features allows you to choose precisely the door you need.
Interior doors fall into four main categories: swing doors, bi-fold/bi-pass doors, pocket doors, and barn doors. Swing doors are the standard doors you see in every home that either open into a space or away from a space. They can close by either a regular latch or by a ball catch. For most areas, a latch works best, but for some closets with double doors, a ball catch is a good solution if you don’t want to use a bi-fold. With ball catch doors you simply push the door closed and it catches a mechanism at the top of the door to keep it shut, very similar to doors on some furniture pieces. As you look at the layout of your plan, consider which way you would want the doors to swing as you walk into a room. Bi-fold doors fold outward when they are opened and lay flat again when closed. These are often used on closets when you need to use either a single or double doors that are small in width. They are an excellent solution for accessing these smaller closets and minimizing the space needed for an open door.
Pocket doors slide into the wall on a track and are the perfect option when you have multiple doors near the entry to a space, or when a swing door would impede the flow of traffic. It’s important to consider pocket door placement during the design of the plans as they require enough wall space to create the pocket, and the wall that the door slides in to has limitations on what can be attached to it. For example, wire shelving in the closets cannot go on the pocket wall because the anchors impede into the track space of the door, so a different kind of shelving would need to be used or the wall left blank.
The final category is barn or sliding doors. These types of doors hang on the wall from an exposed track and slide over the opening. They are usually used for closet/storage spaces, or to cover a hallway opening to private spaces in the home. Like pocket doors, barn doors require additional wall space for the door to slide over when it’s not in front of the opening, so you would want to incorporate them into the plan design phase.
Once you’ve decided on the type of door you need for each space, the construction and style of the doors can help you create the design scheme you want and provide additional function. For bedrooms and public bathrooms, consider using a solid core door, which provides added sound deadening to the space. Music rooms and home theaters can also benefit from solid core doors, and when they are combined with insulation in the interior walls they can go a long way to reducing the noise that travels to other areas of your home.
Interior doors come in a number of panel options to allow you to make a big design impact. For a traditional home, 4 and 6 panel doors or a 2 panel arched top style complement the timelessness of the space. A classic farmhouse design lends itself to 2 panel square top, 3 panel, or 2 panel shaker doors, where a modern farmhouse could use 3 panel or 5 panel. A more modern scheme could consider a single panel or one of the modern 5 panel interior doors. Painting the doors a contrasting color or using a wood stained door is a dramatic way to use the doors as a stunning design element. Black or charcoal gray colors work in either a farmhouse or a modern style. Ocean or navy blues are beautiful for coastal style homes, and deep tones of brown or red complement a traditional or craftsman style.
Whatever your design style, the doors you choose for your home can help it come to life. From the function to the color, the right interior doors can provide you with the custom look you desire in a beautiful way.
