Charcoal sliding-door wardrobes, Horsham

A wall of built-in wardrobes in a bedroom, taken out and rebuilt. The old ones had hinged doors faced in narrow planks, with black strap hinges and a boxed panel above. The new run is three sliding doors across the same wall — two dark, the middle one mirrored — with three fitted bays behind them.

What sliding doors change

A hinged door swings clear and leaves the whole opening in front of you. A sliding door does not. It moves sideways in front of its neighbour, so across a run of three you can only ever have one door’s width open at a time, and one door’s width of the run is always covered.

That has to be designed for rather than discovered afterwards. Each bay here is finished so it works on its own. The drawer, the shelves and the rail in the middle bay all sit inside one door’s width. The wide left-hand bay is divided into two hanging sections, but both sit behind the same door, so both come open together. Nothing needs two doors open at once to be reached, and the bay widths follow the door widths.

The track is the other half of it. The doors hang off a head track running the full width of the opening, and that track has to be straight and level along all of it. Ceilings and floors in a house are neither. Get it wrong and the doors roll open on their own at one end, or bind at the other. It is already up in the first of the carcass photographs, before the rails and the lights went in.

Sliding doors also cost you depth, because the doors and their tracks sit forward of the carcass, so the hanging depth inside has to allow for them.

The top of a full-height wardrobe

Building to the ceiling gives you a top section nobody can reach. The middle and right-hand bays have pull-down rails: a hanging rail on an arm that draws down and forward, out past the front of the wardrobe, and pushes back up. The last photograph shows one down. In the right-hand bay a fixed rail stays where it is underneath, so that bay hangs two levels of clothes in a height that would otherwise hang one.

Each bay has a small light set into the head.

Meeting the room

The run is framed down each side in a pale timber, and that frame is what meets the wall. A carcass is built square and a room is rarely square: the difference goes into the surround, rather than being left as a gap beside a door that has to slide past it.