How to choose doors for an apartment?

 

Buying doors for a house or apartment requires making many decisions. Before you decide on a specific model and colour, check out our expert's guide.

How to choose doors for the right interior style?

Really in the same way as we match all other elements. A door leaf is an important, often dominant, element of interior furnishings. It must harmonise with the rest of the room, just like furniture and accessories.

Do doors have styles?

Of course they do. If we have a panelled door with panels, it will be more suited to classic interiors. Although not always. When the leaf has a very simple and modern panel form, it can also be used in modern or glamour-style interiors. If we are looking for doors for a loft style, we should choose doors that have glazing and decorative elements in the form of black muntins. Door leaves are an indispensable element of interior furnishings and we must remember that.

What should a customer who is going to a door showroom for the first time know? Please advise how to prepare for such a visit.

Door leaves are not bought straight away. Why? It needs to be thought through very well. The fundamental issue is the direction in which they open. Before we choose a door, we must decide which doors are right-handed and which are left-handed. The rule is simple. A left-hand leaf is one where the hinges are on the left, the handle is on the right, and with the left hand we pull the leaf towards us when opening.

Leaves must have space in the interior to open. We need to know the dimensions of the door openings. Three are important – the height of the opening, the width, and the thickness of the finished wall. If we decide on a leaf with a standard dimension (204 cm x 80 cm), the opening should be roughly 91-92 cm wide.

We have three basic types of doors: folding, sliding and a classic door leaf. Should we choose different doors for interiors with different functions?

You need to answer the question of which room the door leaf is intended for and what function it is to fulfil. If we want to completely separate a room, then it must be a closing door, the partition must be acoustic, so that the leaf soundproofs the room.

If we want the space to interpenetrate, I would go for doors with glazing and sliding doors. Thanks to them, we can isolate the space from time to time, but leave it open on a daily basis.

What should guide you when choosing the colour of doors?

If we are conservative, it is better to choose light, white, neutral doors. For more daring investors, I would recommend coloured doors. But careful! The colour should be subdued. Let's go for muted green, navy blue or grey. These colours will look good for a long time and we can easily match other interior furnishings to them. The worst option would be to buy a door leaf in a very strong colour, because then we can overdo it.

 

And what do you think about doors in the colour of window joinery or the floor?

You need to be aware that we will never match the same material. Remember that a door leaf is a decorative element of the wall, and the floor is only a background for the entire furnishings. As for window joinery, it is indeed important, but windows usually have window decorations such as curtains or blinds, and it is they, like doors, that become the vertical decoration of the wall.

At what stage of arranging the interior should the doors be installed?

We install door leaves after the floors are finished, at the stage of installing furniture.

Are details such as handles, muntins, frames important in doors?

A door is actually a very simple element. It consists of an architrave, a door frame and a door leaf. Architraves can be plain, milled, they can have a decorative element, but the most important thing is always the door leaf. Even if it is plain, it must be made of nice material. It can be glossy or matte, decorative elements in the form of glazing may appear. The leaf itself can be milled, it can have panels that have various cross-sections and grooves. All these elements create the character of the door leaf, affect its aesthetics, and we must be guided by these small details when choosing.

 

Doors also have different proportions. Some appear taller or wider. Every taller element in an interior will look better, because the interior will seem taller. I wouldn't overdo it with the width of the door, however. For bathrooms, 70 – 80 cm is enough for us, that is, a 90 cm opening plus a margin for installation. "Eighty" doors are usually suitable for any room: kitchen, bathroom or bedroom, and they are the most widespread, because they don't take up too much space when opening. Doors in interiors where people with disabilities move around should be much larger, however.

Our customers eagerly choose the Sara Eco 2 model, which is flush with the wall. Who would you recommend it to?

Sara Eco is a great example that can make us realize that a door is a wall. Once installed in an interior, they disappear and blend into the wall. Such doors can be wallpapered or painted in the same colour as the wall, and then they completely merge with the background. We just have to remember to leave as small an expansion gap as possible at the floor, because we cannot install skirting boards on the door leaf, unless they are reversible doors.