What are the disadvantages of using bifold doors?
When trying to decide what type of closet door to put in an opening, most of time a bifold closet would an excellent choice, especially when you are designing an urban floor plan where space is truly limited. When designing a single family house, or even an urban floor plan with a large foot print or square footage, space is not an issue when going about your design flow. A very popular type of closet door for this larger footprint is a prehung closet door that will match all of the rooms entry doors throughout the project.
Bifold closet doors are not the first choice, if you are the type of person that aesthetically wants every door in the house to look identical. While this doesn’t bother most people, it will to some. For example, when the entry prehung closet door is installed and designed, it is always a 32” clear mandate to gain acceptance for ADA and Fair Housing Act regulations for the building. Bifold closet doors can have this width, but often will be designed in a wider opening size, like a 48” width. This allows for much more accessible storage options, but again not perfectly identical to the entry width of the door going into the room. This height differential can bother some owners of buildings, and then will decide to keep every single door at the same height.
A broken door is a bad door. This is extremely true for bifold closets in particular. They have a bad rap in the building and construction industry for falling apart the second you place them into a building. This definitely will outweigh the architectural positives of using them. When the door is always breaking, this can cause a huge problem for maintenance staff members as well. If your management firm has a stipulation that they will be fixing all issues in a timely manner, this could be problematic. This needs to be taken into consideration when building with bifold closet doors in apartments or other high transiency buildings. The main things that go wrong with bifold closet doors are they often fall out of the track, the panels separate, and they remain open when you try to closet them. People can sometimes get injured do to fighting with the door working properly, and this could also be problematic as a manager and owner of a building.
Bifold closet doors would be a bad choice if you have a closet opening with limited space in front of the opening. Sometimes urban floor plans may have every inch accounted for in the floor plan like this shown below, found by “5 Layout Ideas for a 12 x 12 Square Bedroom” by the Saavy Heart.
