Custom pocket door designs - make your door your own
To many people, interior design is about following fashions and trends and styling a home to reflect them, thus ensuring your home is as modern and contemporary as possible. Other people take a more individual approach, and look for design features which suit their specific tastes and needs, and if they happen to be ultra cool and trendy too, then that’s just a happy consequence. These don’t necessarily have to be two singular and contrasting approaches, and the lines can be blurred between them. We might take one approach in one room, and the other in the next room. The overall idea is that, interior design is open to your own interpretation and your home is a blank canvass you can add to and reconsider as you feel.
This brings us to the concept of customising, and styling a feature to our individual tastes. In most cases this will be a practical feature that satisfies a functional need in the home, but which can be adapted to suit our design ideas and the overall scheme of a particular room. For example, every room needs curtains, for light and heat control across the different seasons, but these can also be used to enhance and supplement an interior design scheme. The same is true of a floor rug, sofa cushions and even ceiling lights. And the same is also true of doors, and in particular, pocket doors.
Pocket doors as a design feature
Pocket doors are already an important design feature, regardless of whether your home is a traditional, period home, or is a modern, contemporary home. The pocket door is enjoying a 21st century design renaissance because it is adaptable to these extremes of design preference, and for plenty of others in between. As a Victorian invention, the pocket door can suit a period home as a quirky, practical feature, while it can also suit a modern home because it is clean, sleek and minimalist and provides flexible, innovative and smart solutions. And you can also customise a pocket door to make it your own and so that it blends into the design scheme you are trying to create or maintain.
Ideas for customising your pocket door
When assessing ideas for customising your pocket door, this usually falls into two categories, how the door looks and how the door performs. Firstly we will look at the visual and aesthetic properties of the pocket door, and here, an important consideration is that the door opens into a narrow wall cavity – the ‘pocket’ – and hence anything you do to customise the door cannot interrupt with this essential function. In other words, you can attach items to the door surface but they cannot protrude too much in terms of thickness, otherwise you won’t be able to open and close the door.
So ideas to customise a pocket door visually include:
- Glass pocket doors with colourful bespoke designs etched into glass
- A mirror with a design surround
- Wallpaper to suit the design of the room, or to provide contrast
- Painting the door
- Attaching artwork to the back of the door
- Attaching fabric or textile to the back of the door
These are simple and inexpensive solutions for customising a pocket door to suit your design scheme. Now let’s look at the functionality of the door and some ideas for adapting this to how you want to use it, with pocket door furniture and accessories:
- Pull handle – Different handles with a finish to suit colour schemes or light switches and sockets
- Soft-close/anti-slam accessory – A mechanism for controlling the closing function to prevent accidents and damage
- Touch latch – A mechanism on the leading edge of the door which releases the door and closes it when touched
- Co-ordination – Suitable for double doors only, this accessory enables you to close both doors by only physically closing one, as the two doors are linked together
- Self-close – A mechanism for the pocket door closing behind you as you pass through it, and which therefore requires no physical intervention.
Customising your pocket door with MB Direct
A standard pocket door is suitable for most of these design ideas, while some are specific to a certain type of pocket door, such as the bespoke glass pocket door designs and the double door co-ordination accessory. However, these design ideas enable you to upgrade your pocket door and adapt it to suit your individual needs, circumstances and interior design schemes. So check out our range of pocket door systems at MB Direct, order your pocket door today and make a start on making it your own.