Hot restaurants have them. So do, um…barns. Why not your house? Local designers weigh in on the best sources for these rustic, stylish entryway accents.

Do we all secretly want to live in a barn? If the proliferation of barn doors in homes, restaurants, and everywhere else but actual barns is any indication, then yes. We are collectively having a Charlotte’s Web moment in interior design.

And this obsession is only growing, according to Julie Fisher of fcStudio, who, along with business partner Rachel Crowl, has been putting up doors-on-rails all over town (most recently at the new Hyde Park restaurant A10 and in a Lake View residential project she just finished, shown above). “They used to be so expensive to make, and accessible only through architects and interior designers, but now I see ads for them everywhere,” she says.

Fisher still works with her millworker to make the actual doors, but she is impressed by the selection of prefabricated doors (as well as hardware) at Real Sliding Hardware. She likes sliding doors as an alternative to traditional ones because “they allow you to open a room onto to another space in a more visually interesting way than leaving a door ajar—plus they save space.”

Austin DePree of Northworks Architects is also a fan. “The operation of a surface-mounted sliding door is elegant in its simplicity,” he says. “We have used them in barn adaptations as well as modern, urban homes. While they don’t provide the acoustical privacy of a swing door, they are many times more dramatic.” For hardware he recommends The Barn Door Hardware Company.

Turns out being raised in a barn is something to which we should all aspire.

Tags: Home & Garden, Interior Design

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