Bypass Closet Doors

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Let’s face it. Closet doors are not the most exciting things in a home.

They serve a necessary purpose — to keep all your clothes, shoes, hats, luggage and other closet stuff out of view from the rest of the room. When closed, they tidy up the place.

But I think that even though closet doors are basically utilitarian, they don’t have to be boring. They can be just as stylish as the rest of your home.

The closet opening in our guest room is almost 8 feet wide. The original doors were bi-fold style. The advantage to bi-fold is that the doors open up completely on both ends of the closet giving you access to the whole space all at once. But that style seems so dated to me.

We considered all the possibilities when we were remodeling this room and finally decided on bypass closet doors because I wanted it to look updated and interesting.

Now one way to do bypass closet doors on an 8 foot closet would be to do 3 large doors. And I’ve seen that done a lot. But I wanted our doors to have symmetry. And our TV is in the middle of the closet so we wanted to be able to open the middle 2 doors to watch it. (We’re using the guest room temporarily until we get our master bedroom remodeled.)

So here is our closet.

We used the same five-panel style doors that we’re using throughout our home. These are actually hollow core because they’re a little lighter for hanging than the solid core doors we used everywhere else.

I also wanted something a little more stylish for the hardware. Most bypass closet doors have holes drilled in them with round metal inserts to use for opening and closing them. This is so the doors can pass each other without the hardware blocking that.

But you can see that even though our hardware sticks out, the doors can still open and stack behind each other almost all the way.

This is a close up of the hardware we used.