Wood Door Series: Entry Doors: Best Practices When Choosing a Style for Your Home (2025)

Welcome to our Wood Door Series, where we’ll cover a variety of topics, from choosing the right wood material to customizing the design, to help you decide what door is best for you and what to consider once you receive it. Whether it’s interior doors or customized front doors, there are a lot of factors to consider.

Throughout this series, we’re speaking with Brad Loveless, Marketing and Product Development Manager at Simpson Door Company. With 17 years of experience in marketing, operations, and sales at Simpson, he has a tremendous amount of knowledge about wood doors, trends that have come and gone, and how to navigate the many decisions involved to select the right door for your project.

Selecting an entry (or front) door can be a big decision. It’s a major design element that adds to the curb appeal of your home and is the first impression when someone walks up to your home. In this episode, Brad shares what to remember when choosing a door style for your home, from design trends to different installation techniques.

Watch our discussion in the video above, or keep reading to get the highlights.

Benefits of wood doors

Most people ultimately choose wood doors for their beauty. With the design flexibility wood doors offer, you can explore many different shapes, sizes, or even wood species across a variety of applications in your home. This allows you to design the door you want and enjoy its beauty for years to come.

Front door trends

From exploring different door sizes to matching a door to your home’s design, there are many popular front door trends to guide your decision-making and help you envision what’s possible for your next door.

Front doors can be any size you’d like, which adds design flexibility. For example, if you have an older home with double doors, you can replace those doors with a single, large door. You can make a statement on the front of your house with just the size of the door.

Another design tip to help you select your next door is determining your design family. Some of the most popular design families include:

  • Modern farmhouse: blends rustic elements like barn doors and farmhouse sinks with modern characteristics such as open-concept layouts and sleek, minimalist designs
  • Contemporary: showcases a variety of trends and designs, often including colorful decor and unique architecture
  • Craftsman: low-pitched roofs, exposed rafters, decorative beams, and front porches with columns or pedestals
  • Modern: clean lines, large windows for natural light, open floor plans, and a focus on sustainable materials and energy efficiency

If you know the style of your home and want a door that fits that style, you can often filter results by design family, giving you an easy way to start your search.

Door design tools

Whether you’re looking for a door that fits your home’s design family or something completely different, social media is a great place to get ideas and see what catches your eye. If you're looking forinspiration for your next door, online resources such as Simpson’s Instagramor Pinterestshow what other customers have done with their homes.

If you’re not sure whether a door style will work with your home, there’s a helpful visualization tool for customerson Simpson’s website, too. You can customize a door or select a pre-designed product, upload a picture of your home, and the visualization tool will show you how the door will look on your home. If you want to see a door design with different glass types, this tool shows the real-world application and can help you make a final decision.

Overhang protection for exterior doors

You should protect exterior doors from weatherelements as much as possible, and oftentimes, your door’s overhang can provide the protection it needs. As a general rule of thumb, make sure the overhang extends from the home at least half the distance of the height of that overhang from the porch or deck. For example, if the height from the overhang to the ground is 10 feet, the overhang should extend out five feet.

If your overhang does not meet this minimum requirement, look to specific products that are engineered for exposure to the elements. Simpson offers two families of doors—the Nantucket Collection, and doors with the WaterBarrier technology cladding upgrade—that are made for exterior applications with no overhang protection.

Benefits of pivot doors

Extra-large doors are heavy and may not be able to operate correctly with normal hinges. With pivot door systems, the door rotates around a central pivot and can open both ways. This system is great for heavy doors and makes them easy to operate.

With pivot systems and specific hardware, homeowners can control:

  • How quickly the door opens and closes
  • The distance it can swing open to avoid a wall or piece of furniture
  • How the door latches shut, similar to soft-close functionality in cabinetry

Pivot doors can also work for home retrofits. For example, if you have a double-door setup and don't want to change the structural framing, you can design a single door on a pivot system to fit that same opening.

Lastly, while some pivot systems require mechanisms in the subfloor or structural framing above, Simpson’s pivot door system is all built into the door and the framing of the unit, limiting the impact on the rest of your home.

Retrofit or replace doors

When a door shows signs of wear and tear, you can retrofit it (install a new door into the existing frame) or replace the whole door and frame. Retrofitting is a straightforward process. You can find a door design you like and have it fitted to the available space.

In most cases, if it’s time to replace a door, it’s usually time to replace the frame, too. You can inspect the door frame closely to determine which direction would be best for your situation. Simpson recommends replacing the door and frame all at once and enjoying the full beauty and functionality of a new door, sill, and jambs.

If you’re planning on replacing or purchasing new doors, visit or contact a door specialist who can help answer questions, go over the different options, and provide trusted advice.

To learn more about doors, view our other videos in the Wood Door Series:

  • Wood Door Series: Introduction
  • Wood Door Series: Considerations When Painting or Staining a Wood Door
  • Wood Door Series: Choosing the Right Wood Door for Exposure to the Elements
  • Wood Door Series: Design Flexibility and Available Options with Wood Doors

Pin It

Wood Door Series: Entry Doors: Best Practices When Choosing a Style for Your Home (1)

Wood Door Series: Entry Doors: Best Practices When Choosing a Style for Your Home (2025)
Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Patricia Veum II

Last Updated:

Views: 6350

Rating: 4.3 / 5 (64 voted)

Reviews: 87% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Patricia Veum II

Birthday: 1994-12-16

Address: 2064 Little Summit, Goldieton, MS 97651-0862

Phone: +6873952696715

Job: Principal Officer

Hobby: Rafting, Cabaret, Candle making, Jigsaw puzzles, Inline skating, Magic, Graffiti

Introduction: My name is Patricia Veum II, I am a vast, combative, smiling, famous, inexpensive, zealous, sparkling person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.