While interior styles may come and go, there’s one thing that will never go out of fashion. And that’s a bright, spacious home flooded with natural light.
So how do you go about creating a light-filled space guaranteed to boost your wellbeing and energy levels? By installing large glass sliding doors with slimline frames and a stylish, contemporary aesthetic. With this in mind, we settled down for a chat with Minima Sliding’s Operations Director, Dan Smith, to discuss the benefits of large slimline sliding doors.
With so many options on the market, you need to do your homework when it comes to choosing large sliding doors. As well as selecting a high quality product, it’s important to get a feel for the company and the people you’ll be dealing with. Do they respond to your enquiries promptly? Do they have lots of successful case studies to show you? Are they happy for you to go and meet them in person and see the doors up close? All these factors will help you decide whether a particular glazing company is a good fit for you and your project.
In our opinion, it’s all about the view and the open, airy feel you can achieve with oversized glazed doors. The larger the panel size, the more light will flow into your interior, and the more view you’ll be able to enjoy as you look out through your sliding doors. And if you combine very large glass doors (ours go up to 4.2 metres wide per panel) with an ultra slimline frame (ours are just 20mm wide), the doors become virtually invisible because there are fewer dividing lines and no bulky frames in the way of the view.
One of the other benefits of large sliding doors is having better access. A larger door means a larger opening which makes moving furniture around easier and also increases that indoor/outdoor feel when you slide all the doors back and open up your house to the garden. Choosing a door system with a flush track (where the door track is at the same level as the flooring) really helps create that seamless transition from inside to outside.
As well as being beautiful to look at, Minima’s large slimline sliding doors are also highly energy-efficient. The argon-filled double glazing and warm edge spacer bars give the doors excellent insulation properties, helping to lower your carbon footprint and reduce energy bills.
In terms of thermal performance, Ultraline’s sliding doors achieve a competitively low U-value of 1.2. This is significantly lower than the typical U-value of bifold doors, and is aligned with current Building Regulations requirements.
This is always a tricky one to answer, but from our point of view, absolutely not. Bifolds definitely seem to be on their way out now, in terms of building trends, but the clean lines and minimal profile of the Ultraline door system means the doors have a timeless, unobtrusive feel. It’s almost as if they’re not there at all.
But don’t just take our word for it. There’s a reason why so many architects and interior designers specify our product. The Ultraline sliding door system gives a contemporary, stylish look with a classic feel which works well with both traditional and modern properties.
Lots of our customers are worried about this when they first speak to us. They assume a very large door must require a significant amount of strength to slide it open. But, in fact, the opposite is true. The sliding mechanism of our doors is effortless thanks to the lightweight nature of our aluminium frames and the fact that they run on smooth, stainless steel rollers attached to the bottom of each door panel. This means our expertly-engineered doors slide open with the pressure of just one finger, even with our largest pane sizes of up to 4.2 metres wide.
Thinking about large slimline sliding doors for your building project? Give us a call to find out more about the Ultraline sliding door system from Minima.