Patio doors are awesome right? They’re the perfect way to merge your living room with your garden, with a big window out for you to watch over your garden whilst remaining safe and secure in your home. In the Summer time, you’ll have your patio door open all day to let a nice breeze in and they make it easy to come in and out of the garden with your hands full, so it’s perfect for when you have a BBQ or a garden party.

There are a few types of patio doors you can have in your home, all of which are thoroughly excellent but of course have their own advantages and drawbacks. For patio doors there are 3 main types available: The Sliding Door, which consists of 2 glass panels, one of the panels will slide over on top of the other to open the door; The Traditional French Door, which is simply a door formed of 2 large glass doors that open out from the middle; finally you have the Bi-Fold Doors, which are a collection of connected glass panel doors that fold up on each other to open up.

So now you know the main types of patio doors available, how do you successfully incorporate them into your interior décor?

Work The Door Into Your Colour Scheme

Patio doors often have quite a bit of structure to them, in the form of the frames of the doors, as well as the outer frame which holds the doors. Usually the frames and all non glass parts of the door come in either white or anthracite the majority of the time, other colours are available, but as standard white and anthracite are the most common colours.

So when you’re working on the décor and decoration of the room, you’ll want to try integrate the door’s hardware and it’s colour into your plans, you’ll want the walls to be painted in a complimentary colour to your patio doors hardware to avoid it from sticking out and being out of place in your colour scheme.

Consider Window Shading Options

One of the first style points to consider will be your window shading, you can either leave your window unshaded to maintain a good amount of natural light all day long, or shade your patio door with blinds or a curtain. Your options are really dictated by the type of door you get.

With French Doors or Sliding Doors, you can simply hang a blind or curtain over the recess of the door on the interior side itself with no issue as the doors don’t intrude into your interior. But with Bi-Fold doors, you’ll need to get specific Bi-fold door blinds here, due to the folding nature of the doors, they may intrude into the room and be inappropriate for a normal set of blinds, which is why each bi fold door blind, simply attaches to the glass on each door panel, rather than going on the recess in the wall.

Seating Arrangements + TV Positioning

One thing about patio doors, is that they may be a double edged sword when it comes to natural light, having a patio door will let quite a lot of light into your room, which can be great, unless you’re sitting facing the window or have your TV facing the window. This can end with you having too much sun in your eyes or your TV being hard to watch due to the light.

So when planning out the layout of your front room you need to take that into consideration, ideally you’ll want both your seating and TV set up to be perpendicular to your patio door to avoid getting blinded by the sun, so if you have a west facing window, you’ll want your TV & seating to be facing North or South to avoid the Sun.