Ultimate Guide for Louvered Doors

The ultimate guide for louvered doors in your home. Louvered doors are doors with an arraignment of horizontal wood slats or louvers. These louvers are attached to the door’s rails and stiles, sometimes including a center rail for additional support. These louvered doors will give a classic traditional look to your home or business.

Louvered doors offer some advantages over a traditional door design. The louver will allow additional air to ventilate within your spaces. This unique design is a mix of new and old designs. These doors will still allow for privacy to be maintained between the spaces. Some of the most common applications for louvered doors are bathrooms, closets, pantries, kitchens, and bedrooms. Double swinging louvered doors will allow easy access and provide some privacy between the adjacent spaces.

Why Choose a Louvered Door?

Louvered doors are a classic design option that has been around for centuries. The louvered door design will allow for extra ventilation, airflow, and separation of spaces. The design of the louvered door will be perfect for a furnace closet, entrance closet, and bathroom stall doors.

Material for Louvered Doors

The most common material for louvered doors is wood. These doors can be made from a wide variety of wood including Paint Grade, Pine, Ash, Soft Maple, Red Oak, and Sapele wood.

Paint Grade Wood is a budget wood mostly poplar or pine that will paint well. The wood material will paint well and offers a great sturdy wood for the louvered doors.

Eastern White Pine is a beautiful pine wood that stains wells. If you are staining and like a grain of pine wood, eastern white pine is a great option.

Ash, Red Oak, and Sapele wood will have a beautiful wood grain that will enhance the look of your saloon doors if they are stained. The wood grain varies slightly between the material, but the wood grain will be visible and noticeable with these wood options.

Soft Maple wood is also a great paint grade or stain grade wood. Soft Maple has less wood grain and is great when you cannot decide if you would like to paint or stain. The wood grain is not as visible with soft maple wood.

Painted or Stained Louvered Doors

You can decide if you would like your louvered doors to match the existing trim or be a contrasting stain or paint color. Either way, the louvered doors will be a great addition to your door frame. The louvered doors will add a unique element to your door opening. Adding a bold color to the louvre doors will make the doors the feature of your room.

Door Height

How tall for your louvered doors? The best way to answer this question is to decide what you are trying to hide or create some separation of space. Louvered doors come in a wide variety of height options starting at 38” tall and increasing at 5” increments up to full length doors. Once you will look at both spaces, measure the door opening height. If you use a 38” tall door in an 80” door opening, that will leave 42” of open space in your door opening. The most common height for double swinging louvered doors is 42” tall.

Door Sizing and Hardware

Ordering custom doors, make sure to determine the correct door sizing. If you are purchasing the doors and hardware separately, make sure the doors will be manufactured to fit the opening size with the hardware. Sizing will vary be your hardware options. At Swinging Café Doors, we work with your overall door opening size and hardware selection. We build the doors based on those selects to ensure a perfect fit. This takes all the guesswork out of the sizing of double swinging louver doors.

Once you determine the best swing/sliding option for your interior louvre doors, then you can pick the hardware. Double action gravity hinges are the most popular hardware for saloon style louvered doors. 

Door Design and Manufacturing

The louvered door(s) can be a single door, double door, sliding, swinging, half door, or full-length louvre door. Once you have determined the best design for your location you can shop the top brand in louvre doors. Design options can vary between manufacturers. Another consideration for the manufacturer is the lead time to produce the doors. Manufacturers are still seeing long delays on some materials in 2022.

If in the market for swinging louvered doors, check out these great design options.