The Invisible Door

The latest trend in bespoke garage doors is to conceal them so well that at first glance, and even after staring long and hard at a wall, it is difficult to tell where the wall ends and the door begins.

This is where the latest development from door experts Prestige Doors and Gates has attracted intense popularity. It’s a door that sits, as its name suggests, flush with the exterior cladding. “This can be done to achieve a few effects but it is generally to create an ‘invisible’ door,” Prestige Doors and GatesG’ Ben Broide says.

“Flushmount garage doors are also set up differently to traditional garage doors mechanically, and work on an independent torsion, which has the added benefit of requiring less headroom than your standard sectional door.

“To get the cladding just right, a story rod is created on site and used to match the pattern in the door and wall cladding perfectly when it is created in the factory.”

Creating these invisible doors is something people are quickly catching on to, perhaps because people are realising the garage door is one of the single largest features on the exterior of a home. “When you take this into account, it makes sense that people want to look at the type of aesthetic they are creating. When a Flushmount door is specified,people have more control of the aesthetic as the door is not drawing the eye away from the picture of the house as a whole,” Ben says.

Instead, the door blends in or complements the cladding, or it can even be designed as a feature element. “Depending on the cladding chosen, Flushmount doors aren’t priced very differently to your standard cedar or aluminium door.”

Flushmount doors all start life as an aluminium boxed frame, and from there, the possibilities are essentially endless – they can be clad with everything from cedar to aluminium to cement board. “But the list really just goes on. It depends what the home is being clad in and the goal for the end appearance.”

The overriding popularity of bespoke garage doors, and particularly the notion of the invisible door, marks a significant change in the options available for garage doors – until recently they were fairly standardised and the options to differ from the norm were limited.

“With so many ways available now to make the garage door a feature and add to the overall appearance of the home rather than take away from it, people are starting to get creative and are putting more thought into what they can achieve. It’s something we only see growing as we look ahead, as we develop more possibilities to explore different aesthetics and bespoke solutions,” Ben says.

Prestige Doors and Gates specialise in architecturally designed garage doors and gates, and bespoke solutions.

Get in touch with Prestige Doors and Gates on ArchiPro here to see the latest in invisible garage doors.