Sliding doors are not a new invention. Over the years, they have been re-styled and designed to offer the modern home versatile and practical door solutions. As well as interior applications, the sliding door is perfect for connecting the exterior of your home with its interior. It’s easy to incorporate sliding doors into any design.
Connecting the exterior and interior with clear sliding doors
Glazed sliding doors are versatile and practical for a number of reasons. People opt for sliding patio doors, for example, because they can be opened fully, revealing a huge space that allows for the interior of your home to connect with your garden.
As well as incorporating sliding doors into the design, homeowners are also using the same flooring inside and outside to emphasise this sense of cohesion between the two areas. Concrete flooring is perfect for this.
Removing the frame and lip with a ‘frameless’ sliding door
It’s been an annoying issue for some time – the small lip at the base of a sliding door acting as a runner to keep the door in place – but with changes and a new design, it’s now possible to opt for frameless sliding doors.
Perfect for minimal and contemporary design, sliding doors have minimal tracks that are integrated into the floor and walls, perfect for folding or sliding the doors back to create a vast open space.
Add detail with ‘checked’ windows
You want the sliding doors to look stylish when they are open as much as you do when they’re closed. A current trend proving popular is to have large ‘checked’ windows.
Similar to patio doors from the 70s, the window has larger squares that help add detail but also a little privacy. The latest conservatory designs use this style too, perfect for creating a cohesive design to an extension and patio area.
This is a design factor that @BuildItMagazine examined recently with architect Julian Owen. Sliding doors featured heavily in ultra-modern, contemporary conservatory designs with many examples across social media platforms too.
Partial sliding opening doors
The versatility of sliding doors is that you don’t have to open the doors to the full expanse every time. Design ideas incorporating sliding doors as a feature can use the bi-fold mechanism, perfect for when you intend the use the door as the main point in and out of your home.
You can open one panel, two, or more, depending on the weather, what you need to move in and out of your home and so on.
Making more of the view
Whether you have a large expanse of clear window as part of the sliding door wall or panels with checked design, the sliding door of any size is perfect for making the most of the view from your home.
And it’s for this reason that sliding doors are proving to be an ever-popular design feature in everything from patio doors, extensions on a property, conservatories and sunrooms, as well as garden studios and other outbuildings.