Please see our Measuring Louvered Doors page for a discussion of the basic customizations that are possible with respect to rail placements, louver sizes, spacing, and pitch. In addition to making a door the exact right dimensions for your project, you can also add a number of details outlined on this page to personalize the door or to match it to other aspects of the homes interior.
For an interesting and subtle effect, you can construct your louvered doors using multiple species of wood. Some of our customers have chosen to contrast the material in the rail and stile door frame, building the frames in African Mahogany and the louvers in Sapele Mahogany for instance. Or even somthing more dramatic like a White Maple frame with Dark Cherry louvers. Additionally, multiple species of wood can be used for the louvers, in some cases having an entire louver field be one type of wood, with the exception of an accent louver which is a different type. Other architects have specified alternating or repeating patterns of louvers such that the first louver in a field is Red Oak, the second is White Oak, etc. For large commercial projects, we have the capability of creating photo realistic renderings of these details so that our louvered door customers can see in advance the effects of these subtle customizations.
Our default louver profiles are 1/4", 3/8", and 1/2" bullnose, but we also have tooling for beveled and chevron louvers, and can easily match or create tooling for any other profile. Customers must be careful when deviating from stock profiles especially when ordering operable louvered doors to insure that the clearance between the louvers is correct. Our sales and drafting departments can assist in the design of custom louver profiles.
As with all of our custom doors, we can provide true cope and stick profiles to the inside edges of the louver fields. In addition to our standard square profile (S4S), we offer cove and bead, ogee, beveled and others, and can easily create custom tooling to match other sticking in the home, or a personalized preference. One concern with the sticking profile is that, in the case of fixed louvered doors, the door must be ordered with sufficient thickness so that the removal of material caused by the profile does not interfere with the louver mortises. Our sales and drafting departments are ready to assist in this regard as well.
An attractive alternative, or in addition to custom sticking, is the possibility of applying mouldings to one or both faces of the custom louver doors. We have a number of stock mouldings ranging from the simple 3/8" half round to ogees, to complex multi-layered, multi-species bolection mouldings. These mouldings are applied with glue and tiny pins, mitered at the corners, and can add an extra level of detail to make our elegant louvered doors truly one of a kind.
