16 Creative Closet Door Ideas to Dress Up Any Space
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Daydreams about the ultimate closet makeover typically involve perfectly organized racks, shelves, and drawers. The emphasis is on what goes into the closet. But have you ever stopped to think about the design of the closet door?
Consider it an opportunity to make a statement. The closet door is a welcome blank canvas for a decorative artist. Wallpaper or paint helps a doorway blend in, while upholstery creates visual and tactile appeal. Natural wood brings warmth to an otherwise utilitarian space. Reclaimed doors and repurposed antiques lend character. A door masquerading as something else like a built-in bookcase conceals a closet and its contents from the world. Glass fronts provide a peak into your life (unless you line them!), and inset mirrors inject a touch of glamour. Swapping out hardware or adding dimension with molding can dress up an existing door. Perhaps you are bold enough to just float a wall or hang a curtain as a closet door or even remove the door altogether.
Feeling inspired yet? Give the doorway to your walk-in closet, party closet, linen closet, or closet bar a glow up with one of these designer-approved closet door ideas from the VERANDA archives.
Decorate with Art
Enlist a decorative painter to transform your plain closet doors into works of art. In a Los Angeles home, artist Nancy Lorenz embellished door panels in the wife’s dressing room with a forest of flowering branches in lacquer and mother-of-pearl.
Play with Pattern
Use wallpaper in unexpected ways. Designer Chiqui Woolworth cloaked not only the walls but also the closet doors and ceiling in a pastel print from Quadrille in the primary dressing room of a Park Avenue apartment.
Paint to Match the Walls
Jib doors are made flush with a wall and often disguised by continuing the finishings of the wall across their surface. A new build on John’s Island, South Carolina, features them on either side of a wet bar to store bar appliances. Like the rest of the understated space off the entry hall, the doors are painted Calm by C2 Paint.
Clad in Leather
Neutral doesn’t have to equal boring. The muted colors found in the primary suite of a coastal Montecito, California, mansion allow the details of each element to stand out. Take for instance the studded Jerry Pair leather closet doors in the hall connecting the bed and bath.
Stick with Wood Tones
Looking for maximum impact with minimal embellishment? Opt for a rich, warm wood tone. The floor-to-ceiling woodgrain wardrobes in this Marguerite Rodgers-designed walk-in closet emit a feeling of serenity from the moment you step foot inside the space.
Repurpose Artful Antiques
In your weekend antiquing, keep an eye out for pieces that could be converted into unique closet doors. Designer Charlotte Moss had frames built around a set of black-lacquered chinoiserie panels, creating a focal point for the guest bedroom in her New York brownstone.
Mimic a Folding Screen
An ornamental screen shields an area of a large room until the time is right to reveal it. In the grandly proportioned dining room of an L.A. home designed by Michael S. Smith, gesso and silver leaf panels serve as a screen, opening to a glamorous built-in bar for after-dinner drinks.
Create a Faux Front
Closets hide clothes, china, and household utensils from view behind a door, but sometimes you might want to disguise the door too. Birmingham, Alabama-based designer Caroline Gidiere epoxied faux book spines to a jib door in her Georgian-style home’s formal seating area, giving the appearance of an intriguing secret passage.
Line Glass Panels
Instead of traditional closets, deploy glass-front wardrobes for bedroom storage. Then push the envelope by lining the panels as interior designer Ellen Hamilton did in the green guest room of a Vero Beach, Florida, house. Gucci laminated wallpaper adds graphic dimension to custom wardrobes on either side of the bed.
Accessorize with Hardware
As jewelry completes a killer outfit, hardware is the perfect finishing touch for a closet door. Serpentine brass handles adorn the linen-outfitted California Closets wardrobes in the opulent primary dressing room of this Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach.
Install a Floating Wall
Prefer a more open concept with fewer doors? Separate your bedroom from your walk-in closet and dressing area with a full wall, half wall, or built-in furniture piece. Here, designer Ken Fulk positioned a floating wall by leather craftsman Scott Tal as a headboard and elegant screen in the bedroom of a storied Healdsburg, California, estate.
Add Showstopping Wallpaper
Draw attention to your exquisite taste in materials, not the closets where you store tableware. Caroline Gidiere wrapped the walls of her dining room in frothy, hand-painted chinoiserie wallpaper from de Gournay, cleverly covering the jib doors of four big closets.
Keep It Classic
Skip the motifs trending now, and go for something you won’t tire of seeing every day like timeless stripes. Custom cabinetry in the bath-dressing room combo in architect James Carter’s Birmingham home is overlaid with a Schumacher ticking fabric. The knobs are by E.R. Butler & Co.
Continue the Wallcovering
If you have a spare niche off a hallway or “dead space” behind a closet in your home, then you could create a party closet to keep entertaining supplies on hand yet out of sight. Dinner guests in this home would never suspect the adjoining room’s lattice wallcovering camouflages doors to deep recesses on either side of the door frame for storing platters, chargers, vases, and table linens.
Inlay Mirrors
Make a small space feel larger by incorporating mirrors into closet doors, à la interior designer Shelley Johnstone. A party closet tucked into her Lake Forest, Illinois, home provides a hint of glint with inset mirrors outlined in gold.
Express Your Personality
Lean into your favorite colors and patterns when designing a private retreat. Caitlin Wilson claimed the room adjacent to the primary bath in her family’s Dallas home as her “cloffice.” The designer fashioned a “French atelier” look, complete with a feminine floral wallcovering and classically inspired gold-plated door handle from Sherle Wagner International.
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