Go with the flow to add flexibility to your home
BY Brandpoint
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
One of the hot topics in home interiors today is flow. Gone are the days of floor plans burdened by closed-off, claustrophobic rooms, each designed around specific functions.
“Today’s new homes and home remodeling projects embrace far more open designs, allowing for unprecedented levels of flexibility,” said Michael Myers, marketing director for Johnson Hardware. “These floor plans permit gatherings to spill out of the dining room, family room or living room into adjoining spaces with no loss of sociability or take on a welcome aura of privacy when needed.”
They also enable interior spaces to serve new purposes with each new day. The result is a new kind of American home, one where rooms assume different personalities as occasions and spatial requirements change.
Sliding doors are the smart designer’s answer in creating openness within spaces that can’t accommodate hinged, swinging interior doors. In today’s homes, sliding doors have been given a larger role in room decorating. They can glide into place to create walls between rooms or easily glide back out if wide open spaces absent of walls are desired.
“Consider, for instance, the value of sliding doors during the holiday entertaining season. Large family gatherings may require adding a leaf or two to the dining room table, making that dining area a trifle too confining. A wall of sliding doors can expand the dining room into the family room or living room, permitting the party to accommodate the arrival of unexpected guests,” Myers said.
The same functionality ensures the kitchen can serve as a cozy and intimate space for family dinners and neighborly coffee klatches, then morph into an expansive setting that permits easy mobility between the food preparation areas, butler’s pantry and dining room.
Upstairs, the advent of the second-floor laundry room has proven a blessing for time-stressed homemakers who want clothes and bedding to be washed and dried where they’re commonly needed. Here, sliding doors enable the laundry room to be sequestered behind decorative doors when not in use but left open to permit easy movement of soiled items to the washer and clean clothes and linens back to the closets. Multipurpose areas, whether lower-level rec rooms or upstairs master suites, live up to their billing when sliding doors are used to divide or expand spaces as needs demand.
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Sliding doors are the smart designer’s answer in creating openness within spaces that can’t accommodate hinged, swinging interior doors.
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