Everything You Could Ever Need To Know About Sliding Wardrobes

It would be great if we all had the space for a wardrobe that opens outwards, but unless your bedroom is particularly big and bare, it’s just not practical. The solution for those of us that have to ration our floor space is the humble sliding door wardrobe. A simple yet stylish way of adding storage space for your clothes while maximising your space, a wardrobe with sliding doors is entirely self-contained. You can place it as close to your bed, chair or other furniture as you like and still you’ll never struggle to get at the clothes within.

That’s not to say that sliding door wardrobes are the cheap choice, just the practical one. There are many sliding door wardrobes out there with swanky and interesting designs that wouldn’t look out of place in a premium Manhattan apartment or playboy millionaire’s mansion.

But with so many sliding door wardrobe designs out there, how will you know which one’s best for you? OnBuy is here to help with our sliding door wardrobe buying guide! You might think that all sliding door wardrobes are the same, but you’ll be surprised at how varied they can be! We’ll spend some time discussing the basic parts of a sliding door wardrobe and what you’ll need to know before you install one and then round it out with a few example wardrobes for you to check out. Who knows? Your next armoire could be among them!

The basic design of all sliding door wardrobes are the same. Your clothes sit behind a door that slides open on some kind of rail, but that’s being needlessly reductive. There are many different sliding door wardrobe designs. For example, one of the first decisions you’ll make is how many doors your wardrobe will have. Most sliding door wardrobes have two doors, allowing you to easily access all of your clothes, but there are also wardrobes with single doors. These are a little harder to work with but are often thinner, making them a great choice for small rooms.

You have a much greater variety of choice when you pick the aesthetic style of your wardrobe with sliding doors. There are a few varieties of door designs that you can choose from. Shaker doors are fairly popular. These doors have one or more panels embossed in their centre to create a classic look. Often made from wood or another paintable material, shaker doors can be a blank canvas on which you can unleash your creativity. You can also buy sliding door wardrobes with smooth and minimalist doors as well, made from either fibreboard or frosted glass. Such wardrobes suit modern interior design styles really well.

Also popular are sliding mirror wardrobe doors. Sometimes sliding wardrobes with mirrors have one or more doors entirely taken up by a mirrored surface, while others have a small mirror built into the centre of the wardrobe that separates in two when you slide the doors away. A sliding mirror wardrobe has two benefits. The first is obvious, in that it allows you to check out your outfit as you’re getting dressed. The second benefit is that large mirrors reflect the light around the room they’re in, making them seem larger and brighter.

The final part of your sliding door wardrobe is the pair of tracks at the top and bottom of your wardrobe that allow the doors to open smoothly. These tracks are almost always incorporated into the frame of the wardrobe, meaning you don’t have to worry about permanently fixing something to your bedroom floor. Occasionally you’ll find that a set of soft close units have been attached to your wardrobe’s top set of tracks. These reduce the amount of force you can close the wardrobe door with, preventing you from slamming it closed by accident. They cut down noise and minimise damage to the wardrobe over time. If you’re buying a sliding mirror wardrobe, be sure to look out for the soft close feature!

Even the smallest wardrobes are pretty large and fairly difficult to get up a flight of stairs when fully assembled, so it’s no surprise that they’re among the most popular kinds of flatpack furniture. Almost all retailers and marketplaces (including OnBuy, of course) offer a series of sliding wardrobe door kits that you can assemble yourself. 

This can be a great option if you’re handy with a tool set, want to save the money you would have spent on professional installation, or just love a good DIY project. Of course, the downside is that without professional guidance, you could break or misassemble your brand new wardrobe - so take extra care to follow the instructions!

If you’re up to the task of building one of these sliding wardrobe door kits you’ll need a full range of DIY Tools to do it. You’ll definitely need a screwdriver or two to tighten the different panels of your wardrobe together and a tape measure to make sure your wardrobe will fit in its new location. A few other tools, like an electric drill, might come in handy too. And while every wardrobe with sliding doors should come with all of the fittings you need, our collection of nails, screws and fasteners will fill in any missing pieces you might find. 

Now it’s time to slide in talking about a few of the sliding door wardrobes you’ll find for sale!

First up is the Checo Home & Garden Viki Sonoma Wardrobe. With its wood effect styling, this attractive little sliding door wardrobe has a simple, cosy look that’s suitable for a wide range of home decor choices. This attractive armoire is available in two colours: a natural Sonoma Oak colouration, complete with whorls and grains, and a simple but elegant white paint job. Whichever colour you choose it’ll look great in your bedroom!

At 130cm wide, it is a little thin for some users, but it makes the most of that space. This wardrobe with sliding doors has 6 compartments behind its doors. The largest compartment has a clothes rail attached to the top, so you can hang a number of suits, shirts and dresses inside it. This compartment is tall enough for you to fit a few pairs of shoes under those dresses and suits, too. The second compartment is positioned just above the suit one. It’s shorter but just as wide, making it suitable for large folded clothes and towels. Four other compartments, all equally sized squares, allow you to easily organise the rest of your clothes.

From Banbury Modern Furniture (or BMF, as they prefer to be known) comes the smart and attractive wood-effect Enjoy Wardrobe. It’s most similar in style and appearance to the Checo Viki Sonoma Sliding Door Wardrobe that appeared earlier in this list, but it deviates just enough to deserve a separate place on our list.

The most obvious difference is that the BMF Enjoy Wardrobe has a mirror built into one of its doors. Not quite full length, it’s still plenty big enough to check your appearance in and add a small amount of depth to your bedroom. Much like the Checo Viki, this sliding mirror wardrobe has six compartments inside and a hanging rail. However, there’s another way that the BMF Enjoy Wardrobe maximises your storage space: it uses a wireframe rather than a solid base. In addition to being quite snazzy thanks to its black colouring, the wireframe base allows you to chuck objects underneath your wardrobe as well as inside of it. You can stick shoes under there or completely unrelated objects like board games.

The Milan Full Mirror Bedroom Wardrobe is the first of the large wardrobes you’ll find in this buyer’s guide. At 203cm across it’s got plenty of space for a couples’ clothes collection, or one dedicated fashion fanatic’s ensemble. With a pair of large sliding mirror wardrobe doors you’ll breathe new life into your bedroom and see every inch of your outfit as you try it on. 

Despite how large this wardrobe with sliding doors is you’ll never lose track of where you’ve put your clothes. That’s because the Milan wardrobe has fourteen separate compartments. Even better, these compartments are not fixed in one configuration. When building a Milan from their sliding wardrobe door kits, you can pick and choose where to place the central compartments.

Do you want to stack all of the small boxes together and leave the clothes rails on the side, or mix and match them in a chaotic but logical (to you!) set-up? It’s your choice entirely! The only downside with this Milan wardrobe is that, although it has four compartments to hang up clothes in, they’re shorter than many of the ones found in other wardrobes on this list. You’ll be fine hanging up shirts and folded trousers, but you may struggle to keep dresses off the ground.

Our next wardrobe is a choice from MN Furniture, a company that makes a huge range of furniture, not just wardrobes. Huge is also the word we’d use to describe the Marsylia wardrobe, as well as enormous, massive, gigantic and colossal - it’s big, is what we’re getting at. At its smallest it measures over 200cm, which is plenty large enough for most, but there’s an even bigger option and at a whopping 256cm it’ll house even the most committed shopaholic’s wardrobe comfortably.

Of course, this impressively sized sliding door wardrobe is only a good choice if you have the space to house it. Some might say that taking up a huge amount of space defeats one of the primary purposes of investing in a wardrobe with sliding doors, but we say that if you’ve got the garments it’s well worth trying to squeeze the Marsylia in!

Sticking with MN furniture for the time being, our next pick is their Vision wardrobe. Just like the Marsylia, this sliding door wardrobe is available in multiple sizes. At its biggest it’s a little over 200cm (just like the ‘small’ version of the Marsylia) but ordinarily it’s a much more manageable 150cm. You can think of this sliding mirror wardrobe as the ‘goldilocks’ wardrobe: It’s small enough to fit into most bedrooms with a minimum of effort while being large enough to store most people’s collection of outfits. The large mirror which takes up the full length of one of the doors is a lovely touch, too.

We’re back with another Checo Home & Garden for the next entry in this buyer’s guide product roundup, but rather than a rustic, traditional feel, the Delta wardrobe looks thoroughly modern - and it’s got sliding mirror wardrobe doors!

While the Checo Viki Sonoma was a purposely thin wardrobe that sacrificed storage space for an alcove-squeezing width, the Delta is available in all sorts of sizes. If you liked the size of the Viki but didn’t like its design you’ll be pleased to know that they’re a 120cm wide version of the Delta. On the other hand, if you have a legion of outfits that need storing, the Delta wardrobe also comes in an eye-wateringly large 233cm version! 

You can also choose whether or not your sliding door wardrobe has a strip of LED lights built into the top of the frame. These low power lights can provide a little extra illumination when you’re sorting through your clothes, but they might be a bit too gaudy for some. The only choice you don’t get to make is what colour your wardrobe is, as it's only available in white. It’s a colour that works well with the Delta wardrobe’s minimalist aesthetic, but if you’d prefer a black, slate or wood-effect wardrobe, you’ll need to look to the other wardrobes in this selection.

We’re closing out our round-up of sliding door wardrobes with another offering from MN furniture, the Moon wardrobe - and what a gorgeous offering it is! This beautiful wardrobe with sliding doors has a pair of semicircular mirrors fixed into its doors. When closed these mirrors form the lunar shape that the wardrobe takes its name from. It’s a fun and attractive design that would be well paired with modernist interior design choices. Available in sizes ranging from 150cm to 203cm, this wardrobe’s emphasis on style is also apparent in the three colour options available: you have your choice of white, black and slate gray.

This wardrobe’s most striking characteristic is also something of an achilles’s heel. In order to create the semicircular effect, MN furniture couldn’t use full length mirrors. In fact, the mirrors are quite small compared to the size of the wardrobe, with a lot of blank space around the edges of each sliding door. They’ll still extend the perceived size of your room and make it seem brighter, but depending on where you place this wardrobe you might find it difficult to assess your whole outfit at once when you try on clothes.

That was a pretty good selection of what you can expect to find in our sliding door wardrobe category, and though these products are amazing, they’re far from the only pieces of furniture that you’ll find on OnBuy. If you think traditional wardrobes would better suit your bedroom’s style, be sure to check out our bedroom wardrobes selection in full. Wardrobes are just one kind of bedroom furniture that our verified sellers can offer to you. If even the biggest wardrobe won’t fit all of your clothes inside, you can create a dynamic garment-holding duo with a sturdy chest of drawers. And once you’ve selected your outfit for the day you’ll need to take care of your hair and run through your skincare routine - there’s no where to do that than a dressing table!

Please note: The information in this buyer’s guide is correct at the time of publishing but may be subject to change.