Which Type of Door is Right for My Situation?
Seems like a pretty simple question really, isn’t a door just a door? Well the door itself can be made of many materials in many thicknesses and in infinite styles and colours, but this question is about how the door operates. It’s super important because the way a door opens and closes effects the following crucial factors:
1 Access to the stuff inside.
2 Storage capacity
3 The furniture layout in the room
4 Traffic flow around the cabinet.
Here’s how specific hinges can get you and your stuff in and out of tricky storage situations.
After downsizing Margaret wanted a very sleek entertainment unit that basically disappeared from view. In a one bedroom apartment, you need every centimetre of cabinetry to earn its place and Margaret had a variety of things to store behind doors including linen, china, cutlery, luggage and art supplies.
This design hinged on the preferred TV position which was based on the lounge room seating layout. A tall hinged door on the left was a simple, economical approach to getting a good whack of flexible storage for linen, luggage and art supplies.
Low storage is always best as drawers since they bring everything into view and can be stacked to the brim.
To avoid closing the room and TV in too much and clearing the window on the right nicely, the upper cabinet needed to be recessed to a depth of 400mm from the base cabinets at 600mm.
All good so far….but Margaret wanted an integrated ironing board. These can be done in many ways but with the bench height too low for an ironing board, the ironing board would need to be in the upper section for Margaret’s ironing comfort.
If you’re wondering why the ironing board isn’t in the tall cabinet on the left, it’s because the wall return prevents the door from opening beyond 90 degrees which would make ironing there impossible.
Now we have a problem, or in design terms , a spatial planning challenge….
The ironing board sitting inside a 400mm deep cabinet will need to come well forward of the 600mm deep base cabinet so that Margaret can stand upright to iron. A drawer in a 400mm deep cabinet will not bring the ironing board far forward enough.
You might think it’s not so hard, a simple slide out mechanism with a double extension runner will bring the board forward enough, but the question is what type of hinged door will allow that shelf to slide forward of a recessed cabinet and then not obstruct Margaret while ironing? Regular hinges won’t, not even on a 170 degree hinge.
With the expertise of Scott Zeller, a master craftsman we arrived at the bifold door solution which ever so smartly opens and moves to the side for the ironing to get done.
So, if you have a large room with general storage requirements a standard hinged door will do the job perfectly. But for a busy workspace you might jump at a lift-up door which provides the same freedom of movement that airlines have when loading hundreds of suitcases and people in a very busy and very tiny space or the clearance that bi-folds offer in active spaces.
Part 2 describes the doors I commonly use when solving spatial planning challenges .