Design Inspiration for Barn Doors

by American Stalls February 15, 2023

Barn Doors (also known as "Barn Entry Doors" or "Aisle Entry Doors") are one of the first things you notice when you lay eyes on a barn. They dominate the sight line and draw your attention into the barn. For this reason, Barn Doors are a great way to add styling and functionality for your barn's exterior. 

At American Stalls, we offer our clients with a wide variety of designs, fill options, and finishes. This allows you to ensure your barn entrance is truly unique to your barn. In this article, we would like to explore barn door basics, our recommendations, and provide some design inspiration for your own project. 

Basics of our Barn Entry Doors 

• Steel – All of our Barn Entry Doors are built using our heavy-duty steel framing. This ensures that your American Stalls door won't shrink and swell like traditional wood-framed Barn Doors. 
• Finish & Maintenance – Our steel-framed Barn Entry Doors are all finished in our industry-leading powder coat finish. This ensures that you will have little long-term maintenance unlike wood doors which require constant maintenance. 
• Rough Openings for Barn End Doors– We always recommend clients to consider making their Barn Door openings 12' wide. This allows a wide enough aisle to seamlessly bring in heavy machinery (i.e. a tractor) for easy cleaning. 
• Door Handles & Locks – Our Barn Entry Doors all come standard with beautiful stainless steel door handles. We discourage clients from adding a locking mechanism to these doors as it is a safety hazard. 

Let's now explore some design inspiration now that we have covered the Barn End Door basics. We will start with our fully lumber-filled Barn End Door designs. These doors are a fantastic design to provide a simple, timeless, and cost-effective barn door design. All of our Barn End Doors are custom built to order so we can truly customize your doors in many ways. Our customizations include custom powder coat finishes, welded cross buck patterns, horizontal lumber sections, and even the thickness of the steel tubing. 

The above three barns show that our Barn End Doors are truly custom built to order. Each set of doors features a slightly different design which makes them unique to our clients' barns. Before we dive into the in's and out's of our glass-filled Barn Entry Doors, we'd like to first show you yet another upgrade to consider. We use a 2"x4" square tube frame as standard for our Barn Entry Doors. However, we offer clients the ability to upgrade to a 2"x4" tube frame to provide a more substantial look and feel to their doors. You can view this difference with the below set of doors – 2"x2" on the left door and 2"x4" on the right door.

Next up, let's explore various glass-filled Barn Door designs. We offer our Aisle Entry Doors with a large area (usually on the top portion) ready for tempered glass. This adds natural light to your barn's interior. We custom build our doors to your preferences, but we usually locate the window sections starting at roughly a rider's shoulder height. This allows you with the convenience to quickly see into the barn aisle.

The above is an example of Barn Entry Doors with a Quad-Filled Glass Design (top) with cross bucks (bottom). This set of doors also feature an upgraded 2"x4" steel frame which gives the door more visual substance. The below features two different sets of the doors. The bottom left helps represent the sheer amount of natural sunlight that is able to enter your barn. The bottom right photo shows yet another custom design for our client's barn – featuring a mullion-design. 

If you can dream it, we can build it at American Stalls. This article is simply a starting point for you and your barn project. We hope that this article has given some ideas for your upcoming barn project. Do you have any questions on this post or simply need help with your barn project? You can reach us at sales@americanstalls.com or a call at (855) 957-8255. We look forward to assisting you!