Minnesota Star Tribune

Barn doors slide inside for a hip look

A rural staple is being put to work in urban settings as stylish space savers.

July 11, 2011 at 6:03PM

Joe Munson, a furniture designer and fabricator, made sliding metal doors for the bathrooms in this condo of Stephen and Sarah Hopkins. (Mct/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

The urban barn door is moving to the home front.

Demand for the movable monoliths has grown in recent years as homeowners, including condo dwellers and suburbanites, are looking for solutions with character.

Besides their industrial-chic style -- a product of the lofting of America -- the sliding doors and hardware serve useful purposes. An everyday hinged door takes up 9 square feet, eating up precious floor space in a hallway or square-foot-crunched condo, points out Jeremy Crowder, vice president of KNC, a third-generation door hardware business in Canada.

"Not only are sliding doors efficient for the homeowner, they're good for condo developers," Crowder says.

However, extra wall space is required to the left or right of an urban barn door to accommodate its large size. Ideally, the door should be at least 6 inches wider than the opening. Still, it's more efficient than a 36-inch swinging door or sets of them.

Hardware is often the priciest part of the indoor sliders, usually starting at about $1,000. A few months ago, KNC introduced the Crowder Round Track, exposed European-style stainless steel with nylon wheels at the top. A barely visible guide-block in the floor helps keep the door on track. All it takes is two fingers to silently and smoothly glide 400 pounds of wood, metal, glass or other material. The hardware is shock-absorbing to keep a residential door from sounding like an authentic hay-holding barn door.

Lee Norman recently bought the neighboring unit to his condo in Kansas City. The wall between the two loft spaces was removed. Norman wanted the space to be open sometimes, closed others.

"'Shut' is important," says Norman, whose 28-year-old son is temporarily living with him. Norman wants him to have privacy. "But he knows they're both my sides."

Norman considered pivoting doors and other options. But Rees Michael of North Star Remodel in Kansas City suggested the urban barn door because it acts like a movable wall.

Instead of buying a premade door, Norman hired a woodworking firm to construct a 6- by 8 1/2-foot door. The 250-pound unit has an industrial-plywood/composite core with a zebrawood and wenge veneer. A stainless steel handle and rays accent it.

Norman considers the door an artistic focal point of his home. The hardware cost about $2,200, and the door and installation were $4,400.

"I've never been far from barn doors," says Norman, who grew up in Adel, Iowa. "Now I live with one."

When Beth Stedry of Leawood, Kan., was expecting her fourth child, she decided to install a barn door between the family room and playroom, which was going to be converted to a nursery.

"I thought it looked so different and unique," she said. "I like that it slid and didn't open up into the room."

Michael of North Star Remodel found two traditional doors for Stedry and used blacksmith-style hardware that looks as if it were plucked from a rustic barn.

Stedry's doors cost $5 each, and the hardware was $650, but labor, which involved adding reinforcement blocking to handle the weight, brought the total to about $2,000.

Furniture and product designer Joe Munson of Leawood, Kan., made two 8-foot-square sliding metal doors for loft-dwelling clients: They're barriers to the bathrooms.

The core of each is made of tubular aluminum and medium-density fiberboard. A layer of polyvinyl chloride foam board acts as backing for artwork. The large-scale digital images are printed onto vinyl wallpaper. One door leads to a guest bathroom, the other to the master bath.

"They're interactive room dividers," Munson says. The 400-pound doors are typically open, so if they're closed, guests know the rooms are occupied.

The handles are solid chunks of clear, triangular acrylic. Excluding their customized art, comparable doors installed cost about $8,500 apiece, Munson says.

"People are becoming savvier to the possibilities of incorporating creative elements to their homes," he says. "These types of sliding doors are one of those possibilities."

BARN DOOR BASICS

WHERE TO USE THEM

In hallways for laundry/ utility rooms and storage closets

In kitchens, to seal off pantry space or screen appliances

Between living/dining rooms and home offices and bedrooms

CONSIDERATIONS

Adequate hardware is key. You don't want heavy doors to bow out. Also, you want quiet openings and closings.

Ordering hardware requires patience. Typical shipping times are six to eight weeks to accommodate custom dimensions.

Lock it up. Most urban barn doors don't lock -- since they're interior sliding doors -- but they can. You need to know whether you want a lock before making the door and ordering the hardware.

Measure once, then twice. Make sure your contractor has correct measurements and a method to get the door inside your home. The door should be at least 6 inches wider than the opening, so wall space free of furniture to the left or right is required.

Call in safety reinforcements. The doors can weigh hundreds of pounds, so they can't be hung from the wall without a good framework. Usually this means a contractor will have to cut into your wallboard and add wooden blocking to the studs. Stops on the wall-mounted hardware should be installed before hanging the door. A discreet guide bar in the floor helps keep the door on track.