Thrilling Thresholds: 10 Ways to Dress Your Doors

Dabney Frake

updated May 5, 2019

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(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

Doors can be so much more. If you’ve ever lived with a hollow core door (like most of us) you know what I’m talking about. Even if you can’t have something like this secret library door, by Peter Pennoyer Architects, there are other ways to do it up. Here is some inspiration:

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(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

1. Cover Them: With starch and water, you can “wallpaper” fabric to any surface. When you’re sick of it, simply pull it off. That’s your cue to get giddy from all the possibilities.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

2. Camouflage Them: Painting the door, trim and wall the same color cleverly masks a not-so-pretty door. Spice it up with an 80s inspired mural and there is now “art” where there was previously only “door.”

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

3. Wallpaper Them: With some leftover wallpaper, BOOM. Mini accent wall.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

4. Paint Them: This is a quick no-brainer. Choose one solid color, or an inspired pattern, and go to town on that hollow core door.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

5: Chalk Them Up: Okay, this is really the same as painting. But it’s especially entertaining for such notes as “I live with stupid.”

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

6. Accessorize Them: One ceiling medallion and some hardware later, you have a formerly blah door that looks super custom and expensive.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

7. Stud Them: Apply brass nail heads in any design you can dream up and do. But promise me that you’ll buy them in strips vs. individual nails. Otherwise, you won’t have time to brag about your finished project.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

8: Slide Them: Attaching existing doors with sliding barn hardware saves room and creates an new architectural detail. Also perfect for farmer and wife role play in the evening.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

9. Upholster Them: This might require a little more time and energy if you do it on your own, but a padded entryway is the shizznit. Let’s take a moment just to admire that zebra stripe door, shall we?

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

10. Fold Them: And the pièce de résistance: I love this set of doors most. A leap of faith and some creative finagling is required here, but I believe in you.

(Images: 1. Peter Pennoyer Architects 2. How About Orange; 3. David Bilborough via Cadenced; 4. Anthropologie; 5. Wary Meyers; 6. Aimee Herring/Living in a Nutshell via Design*Sponge; 7. Martha Stewart.com; 8. Jeffrey Hirsch for New York Social Diary; 9. Eleanor Cummings; 10. New York Social Diary; 11. Γιώργος Κορδάκης via 79 Ideas)