I have one ezyjamb installed that's been in place about 6 months or so.

I got the upgrade with the completely concealed hinges. On the ezyjamb the standard hinge is surface mounted and I did not think this was too good-looking when the door was open.

The jambs are very heavy steel. I am using solid slab doors which are heavy. The floors have been refinished, and the roofs overhead have been replaced since this has been installed so there has been lots of vibration and stuff to the house and no problems so far.

They are not cheap. A 32" door jamb set up with the RocYork concealed hinges was $500 or so.

It's been a year now. Ours have held up fine. There is much difficulty with the finishing, according to our GC. If you look at ours closely you can see that the quality of drywall finish is not 100%.

Incidentally, they were installed, then the doors were removed and sent off site to be lacquered, then put back on close to the end of construction.

Only 2 of us here. We don't slam doors. The edges have held up fine. If I ever built again I would not do it this way, however.

jn3344 - Which product do you have? The doors look great and I don't see any finish issues on my monitor. Is the difficult with getting a perfect finish the reason you wouldn't you do it again?

Your photos demonstrate an element of my hesitation. Frameless doors are an great look but they look best from inside the room where the door is flush with the wall surface. I want it to look best from outside the room, not inside.

Ezy jamb has an inswing version which looks flush from outside an inswing door but it requires very expensive custom doors.

Here is the detail going in. This house is getting veneer plaster. One thing you don't want to do in any door installation is have a joint in the wall substrate that lines up with the edges or corners of the door.

Thanks for the photos.

My contractor has offered to replicate the look with drywall corner beads to save me the money of buying specialized jambs. Anyone think this is a good or bad idea?

I worry that this won't hold up as well. And he has the same concern, but he has never done it before and is erring on the side of caution so I don't get mad at him if cracks develop down the line.

As for the inswing version, I don't think you would need custom doors necessarily, you would just need someone who knows how to rabbet and bevel a standard door the right way.

My contractor has offered to replicate the look with drywall corner beads to save me the money of buying specialized jambs. Anyone think this is a good or bad idea?

I had edited my above post to address this after you looked at the pictures.

I think this is a bad idea. I have seen this executed very poorly, and I have also seen it wearing poorly over time. If my carpenter were to do it this way (which he has done in the past, and well), I think it would cost me more in labor than the prefab jamb set up. He said that once he figured the first installation out the rest would not be much different than a regular doorjamb installation, instead of creating it each time.

I don't think these look as tidy and I would think not as durable. And these are pictures on the internet posted as good examples. I question the durability of the drywall edge here, even with the corner profile since it actually projects slightly beyond the jamb

Per ezyjamb, their inswing version requires a 2 1/4 inch thick door and grooves down the edges. This is a very expensive door.

Not sure if anyone else makes a frameless inswing doorjamb that uses regular doors. I'd be very interested in that.

If you want to use slab doors, which I am assuming you do for a flush appearance, I wonder if you could apply 1/4" material onto each side of a 1-3/4" door, like so:

But where do you get door hardware for 2-1/4" doors? That won't be off the rack either, that's semi-custom.

I am curious though where you need a door that swings into a room that looks better when closed on the outside? Usually this would indicate a door that 's closed all the time (which often swing out), and typically on an inswinging door looking good from the primary space, inside, is more typical.

One of the builders we spoke with didn't want to even attempt those doors. The architect suggested a trim similar to this photo. Do it the same color as the walls to minimize it.

The reason I would not do it again is just because I have belatedly decided I actually like trim done well.

Never knew which brand and we were 1400 miles away during construction. Sorry.

Lake Washington residence · More Info

I like those door casings. I have looked for a minimalist casing like that but haven't found one. Anyone got a source on where I could get a trim like that? Like this photo I will have squared baseboards and no crown molding.

My feeling on the frameless doors is that it is a design element that you'd want to show off because it looks really cool when executed properly. Most people have never seen something like this. So when you have guests or are in "showing off" mode you close the doors and let the doors do the talking ;-)

Whether it's an office, bedroom or bathroom door, I don't need to see the frameless design from the inside.

When I did that type of casing we went to a full service lumber yard and they were able to put a slight eased edge on any size of rectangular stock (in poplar because we were painting it).

My base detail is a piece of 3/4" stock routed for a 3/8" reveal overlay. I didn't want thick baseboard with no other trim, and recessing it fully was more expensive, because the floors are not perfectly flat (the house is 50 yo) and the plaster walls waver slightly. Using thin stock would have followed any slight waver in the wall instead of looking "flat". (not to scale, it was 3/8" + 3/8"

My doors are done like the photo Pal linked, the one with stained wood and peachy paint. No trim with a bullnose rounded corner, very common here in So. CA in Spanish style houses. I truly hate them!

There is a metal piece that supports the bullnose edge and it is prone to paint chipping off. Difficult to fix and a pain to paint the edge around the doors.

I hate them so much that when we built our guest house, we copied many of the design elements from the existing house ... except the way the doors were finished. I used nice beefy real wood trim around all windows and doors.

We also have this detail on the outside with the stucco wrapping right up to the windows. We would like to upgrade some of the windows, but because of the way the are finished inside and outside, it makes it a major project because you have to destroy drywall and stucco, instead of just beng able to pull off trim and replace the windows.

Did I mention how much I hate windows and doors without trim?

I think what you are going to have to do if you want to do something like this (obviously ;)) is do a cost comparison of the entire detail from start to finish.

I think the EZYJamb setup is less expensive than the Fry Reglet. Fry Reglet looks more complicated and has a gasket and such. (And what happens if you need to replace a gasket?)

So $500 for the EZYJamb frame. The flush inswing set up is probably more.

Say you can't get someone to sandwich slabs on a regular door to create the thickness, ( I don't know why not but say it's custom). About 10 years ago I did some simple custom doors in standard sizes and they were about $1000 each.

Emtek hardware is available for thick doors. Their modernist knobs and levers will be at least $125.

So a rough number per opening that gets the flush inswinging door could be $1625 or so for the materials, less installation.

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So maybe $5000 for three doors is not a huge undertaking. However, all the other doors in the house should really be detailed in the same way for consistency. The price really only goes down for the slab door itself, you will want a similar trimless appearance and the same hardware throughout for consistency.

The exception to this is if you systematically change trim details on an upper floor or something, to something similar but less refined and less expensive. But it has to have a certain order to it.

There is nothing wrong with the classic modernist detail of plain slab doors and minimal trim, and most people don't even notice the difference between a hollow core slab and a solid slab unless they touch it (and lightweight hollow doors are so common I don't think a lot of people realize solid doors are still made).

But nothing makes a nice ordinary detail look like crap than a spectacular detail next to it. So you really need to decide how far you are willing to take it, going all the way with it will be Much more expensive than regular detailing. You can get a lot of well done simple molding and slab doors for a fraction of the cost.

I don't know if you are still reading if you decided to do small trim, but this is what you want it to look like, IMO, and if you can't get this it might not be worth doing

Palimpsest,

"most people don't even notice the difference between a hollow core slab and a solid slab unless they touch it (and lightweight hollow doors are so common I don't think a lot of people realize solid doors are still made)"

I thought you'd enjoy hearing that our architect has a client who wasn't happy with their insanely expensive huge front entry doors because they were too light. There was an expensive honeycomb material inside to keep them from being too heavy. The owner had sand put inside the doors so they would become heavy again :)

I love the look of those doors and glad to see some photos here of them being used in 'real life'. I have an inspirational photo of them from Vincent Van Duysen.

I just discovered something else to get a really cool flush door look that is maybe more unique and avoids some of the headaches of "ordinary" flush/frameless doors.

The only hitch is that to do this I'd have to paint the door jamb and leave it fully exposed. I don't know if there is any downside with doing this, I assume not.

The idea is to use a Z reveal around the door jamb to create a reveal around the door. Here is the PDF for the Fry Reglet z reveal.

Since I already have wood beam door frames I would have to cut a groove into the door frame around the door jamb. Again, I don't know if there is a problem with doing this, I assume not if the groove isn't too big. I'm thinking maybe 1/2" deep and 1/2-1" wide. I don't think that would affect the structural integrity.

Here are some photos I found of what it would look like. One photo is a windoww instead of a door but same idea.

Thoughts?

My reveal would have to be closer to the door jamb, this last one is a few inches away.

Dust and grime collector in the groove?

I knew somebody would say that!

I thought about it, if I make it an inch wide and only a half inch deep I don't think it will get too grimy or too hard to clean. You think it will be bad?

I agree that some of those narrow reveals would definitely be a lot harder to keep clean.

Double the necessity for perfection?

It does give extra interest to the frames.

It's a very expensive detail and one that really requires that multiple trades all know what they are doing. Tying the floor into it means that has to be executed well too.

Even with the overlay base I did above in one room with builtins on two walls it meant that the bottom of the baseboards had to be scribed to meet the floor so they were perfectly flat and level on top. A reveal base is at least this tricky. In general I think this is a more expensive detail than buying the flush jambs and using a minimal conventional base.

Some minimalist details price out at 5x or more than conventional details.They are the first thing that gets dropped due to budget. Painting them is more expensive too.

You can clean them with the vacuum cleaner with a soft clean brush head or your finger wrapped in a soft cloth.

Honestly the people who generally put details like this throughout an entire new build are wealthy enough to afford people to clean for them and don't worry about that. The plasterer and painter who I know that can do these details typically work for the local billionaires, hedge funders and ball players doing this sort of thing.

I am lucky to have a carpenter who can do this because his degree is in fine arts and set design and he likes the challenge. But he works intermittently and the current bed and bath took two years. You can't build a house that way and the alternative is to pay someone a premium to do it at a normal pace.

The other thing I've noticed is that not a single building professional has weighed in about actually doing this. And two homeowners who've done it. I design but I don't do the work.

So this sort of detail is not something most people know about or care to know about since the current trend is trim trim and more trim to cover up all those inconsistencies. And the ironic part is a lot of people at a glance would call this "cheap" because it's flush doors and no trim.

The key to frameless doors is getting the door as a single package, engineered to work together. The issues described in the comments above are fairly typical when a GC or trim carpenter is asked to figure out the door frame components, hinges, installation, door slab, drywall returns, site paint — it's certainly possible but it is challenging, it almost always takes a ton of time and the results may or may not be perfect.

Just for reference, here's an installation from Boulder, Colorado:

In this case, it is a floor-to-ceiling door, 9 ft tall. The door frame/jamb is made of aluminum extrusion and mounts into a rough opening before the drywall is installed. Some other door jamb systems attach onto the drywall which has less structural rigidity and may lead to cracking issues mentioned in the comments above.

Yes. How do I get that?

need a simple solution to this problem as well. i have a TV wall in the family room that will have two doors flanking it (see photo which is a view of the family room from the kitchen)

@Batgurl Happy to help. There might be several design approches to this, depending on what's behind these two doors and what this wall is going to look like when finished. Can you please reach out through sales@angelbau.com?

any recommendations or experience for doing venetian plaster right up to a jamb like this? even on inside return portion of sheetrock