8 WAYS TO INCLUDE SLIDING BARN DOORS IN YOUR HOME
Most people think of barn doors as belonging on enormous red wooden buildings that store bales of hay and cows. But in the interior design world, a barn door is something completely different. Indoors, a barn door is a large wooden door that you can mount on smooth rollers to create a door that slides rather than one that swings. Without the inner-wall madness of trying to install a cavity slider door.
Here at Parkwood, we specialise in a variety of barn doors for homes. Interior designers and DIY homeowners everywhere are finding new and exciting ways to use barn doors for elegance, charm, and surprisingly space-saving convenience.
Today, we’re here to talk about all the different ways that you could use a sliding barn door in your own interior design. Along with just a few fun ideas that will no doubt inspire you to think of even more places a sliding barn door might go in your home.
1) Sliding Entrance to an Open Living Room
One of the most popular ways to put a sliding barn door to use is to keep your living spaces open. Open design houses are wonderfully airy and make it easy for the family to spend time together while working on a variety of activities. But the way your open living area is laid out can have a significant impact on how you enjoy the space.
If you have an open archway to a hall that you’d like to close sometimes, a sliding barn door is the perfect way to do this. You can also use a barn door as a smooth-sliding entrance to the kitchen so that someone with full hands can easily nudge it open ahead of them.
2) Quick Solution to an Uneven Doorway
Not all homes are perfect, and some doorways are more difficult to fill than others. If you have a doorway that is of strange dimensions, is an uneven rectangle, or placed over a precarious step, it may be nearly impossible to find a pre-made door to fit into the space. But a sliding barn door doesn’t need to fit into the doorway.
Instead, you can set up the track so that the door slides smoothly to rest over the entire open doorway when it’s closed, and rests artistically against the flat wall next to the doorway when open. This way, there’s no need to perfectly fill the doorway and you can still get the privacy and sound insulation you’ve been dreaming of.
3) Temporary Room Separators
For some families, an open design is a mixed blessing. You may want an open room sometimes, and more closed off spaces at other times. Like when your children are doing homework or there are several people working on different projects at the same time.
If you have a wide-open space with separated work areas, you can create temporary mini rooms by using sliding barn doors as separators. They can even stack in parallel tracks so that two doors wide can dock as one door width when opened. Using barn doors as room separators is a great way to transform your open living areas to create shared spaces or privacy as needed.
4) Save Door Space in Tight Areas
Some homes have doorways in places that it’s not very convenient to have a door. Narrow hallways, small bathroom doors, tight corners, and furniture-packed rooms can all contribute to door-swing troubles. Especially in a house with small bedrooms.
Sliding barn doors offer an interesting alternative for tight spaces. Instead of dedicating all that space to door swing, a sliding door merely needs it’s own width again on the wall next to your doorway, doesn’t matter which side. All the convenience of a cavity slider, and you don’t even have to go inside the wall.
5) Create Hidden Rooms
One delightful possibility with sliding doors is to hide the existence of a room entirely. Use the door to appear as a decorative element or even paint it identical to the wall and you can completely cover the existence of a doorway. This can create completely secret rooms, a fun aspect of any home and a wonderful trick to reveal to trusted guests.
6) Camouflage Storage Areas
You can also use this trick to hide the existence of less-than-decorative storage areas. A sliding barn door can elegantly hide the existence of storage closets and cabinets while also making them easy to access when required. The door itself acts as a form of wall decoration while the storage remains elegantly hidden when you don’t need to access its contents.
7) Cover Pass-Through Windows
Another interesting use for sliding doors and half-doors is to cover over pass-through windows. Pass-throughs are open areas in a wall that create a window from one room to the next. They have been going in and out of style for decades so many modern houses include one or even several.
But these interior windows are sometimes inconvenient for containing sound, smell, or light between rooms. If you want an easy way to both mask and insulate a pass-through in your home, a sliding barn door is a great way to do this. It slides aside easily to make use of the pass-through functionality and then closes to keep the rooms separate when that’s more preferred.
8) Separate Multi-Functional Rooms
Sliding barn doors are also useful for making use of rooms that serve multiple purposes. If, for example, your home office is in a corner of the living room. A sliding barn door or two could easily section create a temporary room during focusing work time or open up to allow your office to be part of family time in the evening.
In the kitchen, sliding barn doors can be used to create an exclusive eating area separate from the kitchen or leave the space open for a more friendly family vibe.
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Sliding barn doors are not just a hot decoration tip. They’re incredibly versatile and often the solution to awkward spacing problems. The sliding design makes it easy to do anything from separating large areas to creating space in small rooms. For more on how to choose the right sliding barn door for your interior design project, contact us today!
