Brightening your home - pocket doors & natural light benefits

When assessing the benefits and qualities of a new home, or a potential new home, traditionally people have looked at the obvious things, the number of bedrooms, the size of the garden and the style and layout of the home. People also look at the possible options to extend and of course, location is a primary consideration in whether a home is suitable in the first place. But when ruminating over the feel and general ambience of a home, natural light is increasingly seen as a highly desirable feature, and is often a subliminal reason why a home feels more welcoming and appealing.

The benefits of natural light

There are many reasons why natural light benefits us in our daily lives and in making a home more attractive:

Inviting – Natural light flooding through doors, windows and skylights makes a home feel bright, fresh and invigorating. It makes a home feel inviting and a place people want to come to and visit.
Improves mood – A person’s mood is automatically lifted by natural light, so it is a vital source of energy to improve mental wellbeing.
Motivation – Natural light creates a hub of activity and motivates people to get more done. This might be housework, holiday research, exercises like yoga or a home running machine or your actual work. More and more people are working from home, and natural light is essential for making people more productive.
Cost-effective – It follows that the more natural light you are relying on, the less artificial light you need. This will reduce your energy consumption and hence your energy bills.
Less artificial light – Using less artificial light will also improve moods and motivation, and not just because you are using natural light instead. Too much exposure to artificial light can cause headaches, eye strain and dry eyes, particularly if you are working with a laptop also. This can lead to bad moods and even depression over a period of time.
Increase value – Ultimately, your property value will increase with the more natural light it has. All the above factors combine to make a property much more appealing and desirable, and natural light is a big attraction for people looking for a home with strong health and wellbeing characteristics.

How you can create more natural light in the home with a pocket door

There are a number of ways you can improve the natural light in your home, but ultimately many homes are restricted in this respect. Not everyone has the option of investing in an extension, to create more windows or to install skylights to invite natural light from above. And the external features of a home also impact on the natural light you can create. You may be restricted by fences, hedges and trees which block out light, but can’t be removed, or which would make a home too open and affect your privacy and security if removed or reduced.

A cost-effective way to improve natural light in a home is therefore the pocket door. This can be installed without major structural work and can be retrofitted in many rooms in the home. Certainly if you are thinking of an extension or an internal restructuring, pocket doors are a great way to improve natural light and can be easily incorporated into new stud walls. The main ways that a pocket door can improve natural light include:

Glass pocket doors – By installing a glass pocket door you are enabling light to flow through a home naturally. A traditional solid door is an obstacle to light flow, and is a barrier which essentially creates darkness. Glass pocket doors can be used to make small rooms more comfortable and usable, because the increase in natural light makes them feel bigger. If glass pocket doors are strategically placed in the home, they can be used to enable natural light from the outside to have more impact inside the home, for example they could be used for rooms that lead into corridors, which otherwise would be very dark.
No obstruction – Because pocket doors open by travelling in the same orientation into a wall cavity, they do not cause an obstruction in a room. A traditional hinged door opens into a room and therefore blocks light. However, with a pocket door, you can leave the door open and it literally disappears from view and causes no obstruction, hence enabling maximum light to flow through.
Flexible spaces – Pocket doors enable you to create flexible spaces which can be used in different ways, particularly in large ground floor spaces. Many people use pocket doors to open and close spaces according to how they want to use them, such as kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms. You can use these as open and communal spaces by opening the pocket doors (double pocket doors are great for this if you have the wall space) or close them for more intimate, cosy spaces at other times. This means you can control the amount of natural light according to whether you are entertaining, having a big family get together or having a quiet night in.

Premium quality pocket doors from MB Direct

Check out our range of pocket door systems and think about how to create and improve the natural light in your home. There are plenty of ways to do it, and all in a cost-effective way. So order your pocket doors online at MB Direct today.