Is having two different styles of interior doors a design no-no?

10 months ago

Remodeling our house and need to replace all the doors. The house is mid-century modern, but I want to move away from it being strictly mid century modern and be more a blend between mid century modern and modern.

I know typically all the interior doors should be the same to create uniformity. HOWEVER what if the house has two separate "wings" and each of the two separate areas has the same type of interior door? I love 3 panel shaker doors because of the texture and character. My husband likes them too but thinks that there will be too much geometry in the hallway that has bedrooms/bathroom because there are 7 doors there. The way our house is set up, there are two different wings. There is the living room/dining room/kitchen area, and then there is a door to a hallway that leads to all the bedrooms/bathrooms. There is a door that separates the communal spaces from the hallway with the bedrooms/bathrooms, so it feels like there are two separate wings. My thought is maybe we can do 3 panel shaker doors in the communal spaces and 1 panel shaker doors for all the doors down the hallway. There are only two interior doors in the communal area, so there would be two doors with 3 shaker panels, and the rest of the interior doors in the house would 1 panel. I've attached a photo from the living area looking down the hallway, and you can see that you can't even see the doors in the hallway (plus there is going to be a door there that closes between the hallway and living room), so I think you wouldn't even be able to tell that they are different unless you were standing in front of them? Btw I know this photo is crooked, but it's the only one I have..we are doing construction so tearing things down and not everything is in alignment right now. Am I crazy to do two different kinds of doors? I just think 1 panel shaker doors throughout our house is well, a little boring, because the architecture for our house is pretty simple/minimalistic as it is.

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palimpsest

10 months ago

last modified: 10 months ago

I think you can mix door panel arrangement if it follows a system, having lived in a couple of very old houses (pre Civil War), that had more than one door style in the house. (These were also very large houses with 4 stories, so distinct public and private areas.)

Most 20th century houses don't really lend themselves to the systematic approaches to trim levels like these older houses. But I think that there is one way to make it work, and that is to have a simpler door on closets inside rooms. So one style on the room entry doors and a simpler style on closet doors. So you could do a panel door of some sort on the room door and a simpler panel or slab on the closets. But it has to make visible sense that you can discern easily rather than a mish mash.

I think a "shaker" door has actually become "modern" or "contemporary", (but it is not MCM), just through it's almost ubiquitous use in current homebuilding practice. A flat recessed panel with minimal sticking is the Default door for virtually all non-"traditional" new construction in my area.

But I don' t think your plan of doing one style in one wing of the house and one in the other is systematic and I don't think it will do anything except make the house look like you remodeled it at two different times and you weren't paying attention to what you picked out between jobs.

Either a slab door is too boring or it's not too boring, either a multipanel door is too elaborate to use or it's not. It's not something that is or isn't depending upon which room in the house it is. Pick one and stick with it. is probably the best option. Just liking more than one thing is not a good enough reason either. I could find a dozen door styles that I would like in some sort of context, but that doesn't mean I should use one of each if I have 12 doors.

You don't wear one of each shoe, because you can't decide between two, you generally don't wear the patterned top of one suit with the different patterned bottom of another because you like both. A house is the same way. In fact, maybe stricter, because you can go home and take off the mismatched outfit at the end of the day.