Front door styles

The panel arrangement is what dates a door

More than the colour and far more than the material, the arrangement of panels is what makes a door look right or wrong on a particular house, because each pattern belongs to a period.

• Four panel. Two over two. The default Victorian and Edwardian door, and the safest choice on almost any period house in the country.
• Six panel. Georgian proportions, with the smallest panels at the bottom. Busier, and it wants a taller opening to look right; on a short door it reads as cramped.
• Half glazed. Glass in the top half. It transforms a dark hall more than anything else you can do to it, but think about security before you commit to it.
• Flush. Flat face, no panels. Reads modern, shows every mark, and lives or dies on the ironmongery: good handles make it deliberate and cheap ones make it look like a cupboard.
• Cottage. Boarded, usually with a small glazed opening. Right on stone and render, and conspicuously wrong on a 1930s semi.

The leaf and the opening are different measurements

A standard UK external door leaf is 838mm by 1,981mm. Period properties are frequently nothing like standard, so the tool takes the leaf as an input rather than assuming one.

Add side lights or a fanlight and the structural opening gets wider or taller while the door itself stays exactly the same size. Those are two different numbers and confusing them is how people order a door that does not fit the hole, so the tool reports both separately.

Why there is no material picker here

Every other visualiser on this site leads with the material. This one leads with colour, because a front door is painted and from the street a timber, composite or uPVC door in the same colour and the same panel arrangement read broadly the same.

What actually changes the look is the panel arrangement, the colourand the ironmongery. Those are the three things worth trying, and they are the three things this tool gives you.

Material still matters enormously for how the door performs, how it ages and what it costs. It just is not a question you answer by looking at a picture.

Colour, and the same warning as everywhere else

A screen emits light and a door reflects it, so no visualiser can promise you the colour you will get. What this is genuinely good for is ruling colours out: it will tell you very quickly that the bright one is too much against your brick, or that two of your three shortlisted greens are indistinguishable from the pavement.

There are no brand colour codes here, deliberately, for the reason set out on the render colour page: accurate values for those systems are a product their owners sell, the free charts of them disagree with each other, and a wrong code under a swatch is worse than no code because somebody orders paint off it.

The two practical checks

Glazing and security. If you are going half glazed, the questions are whether the glass is laminated rather than toughened, and whether the lock can be operated by somebody reaching through a broken pane. Plenty of half glazed doors are entirely secure; it is worth asking of the specific door rather than deciding by style.

Whether the opening is square. On an older house it very often is not. A supplier surveying properly will pick that up and one quoting off a photograph will not, which is a problem that only surfaces on fitting day.

Your photo is opened and drawn inside your browser, and the picture you download is assembled on your own device. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account, which matters here more than on most tools.