Home Design: How to Handle Door Placement

Where people put doors will control the flow of traffic through a house and determine how individual rooms function. At best, poorly placed doors can be annoying. At worst, they are a safety hazard. Usually door placement is a matter of code and most builders place them correctly. But leafing through magazines that offer building plans for sale, I sometimes find blunders. Or I see a house (like mine) that has them anyway. Once in awhile a do-it-yourself project actually creates bad door placement because the person doing the project doesn’t see the problem until it is too late. Here are some rules of thumb that can help you keep the Door Monster at bay: 

1. A door should never open into another door. (This includes bathroom shower doors and appliances with doors such as a range or refrigerator.) 

2. A door should never open into a primary traffic area such as a hallway or the foot of a staircase. 

3. A door should never direct the flow of traffic through  the middle of a major living space or work area. 

If you are building a home from the ground up, check your plan to make sure the doors are properly and safely situated. Be sure to check the placement of major appliances in your kitchen and shower doors in your bathrooms. If you find poor door placement, ask for changes early in the game. With an existing structure, if you can't eliminate or relocate the offending door, try rearranging the room's contents to compensate for the problem. 

My own kitchen was a Frankenstein. It measures 11' 8" x 7' 6". Not princely, but enough for a nice kitchen, if it were well designed. Alas, whoever drew my house plan was not thinking clearly. Or else had criminal intent. Kitchens should be dead-ended with traffic flow routed around them. Improper door placement turned my kitchen into a corridor with appliances. It even forced doors of our major appliances to open directly into work areas and against each other. (See companion diagram.) 

DOOR PLACEMENT DISASTER

Credit: Wendy Henson

Copyright: Wendy Henson