uPVC or aluminium front door, made to measure

This layout is a single door with no fixed glass beside it. That makes it right for a wall with no room for a wider frame, or for an entrance where you don't need extra light in the hall. The door opens inwards, as front doors usually do — a back door that opens outwards is a separate layout.

The standard size is 1,000 × 2,100 mm. If you want more light in the hall or a wider entrance, the front door with side panel on the left, the front door with side panel on the right and the front door with side panels on both sides are the same door with a fixed side panel on one or both sides.

A single door with no side panel suits a narrow frontage, a flat, or a terraced house where the gap between the neighbours leaves no room for anything wider. It is also the layout that loses least heat through glass: no side panel means less glass in the wall, and glass usually insulates less well than the door panel itself.

Of the six door layouts, this is the narrowest and the cheapest: no extra pane, no extra frame length, just the door. If you would still like a little more light in the hall without going to a side panel, look at the door designs themselves: some of them have their own glazed strip or glass panel in the door — that is a choice of door design, not of this layout.

For a door, measure not only the opening but also the threshold height and the floor finish on both sides: a door often sits at a slightly different height from a window, and the difference between the inside and outside floor levels decides how the threshold is finished. Order to the outside size of the frame, and have your installer confirm exactly how it meets the floor before you place the order.

In both aluminium and uPVC you can choose colour and finish freely from the RAL or foil colour chart, often with a different colour inside and out — a light colour inside for the hall, a darker or bolder one outside for the look of the house. Maintenance is mostly about the lock and hardware: a front door is used and locked every day, so the lock and hinges deserve checking more often than a window you open a few times a week. A well-kept lock is also a security matter: a stiff lock tempts you not to lock up "just for a minute", and that is exactly when a front door stops doing its job.

When renovating a narrow frontage, this is often the only layout that fits without widening the opening — on a terraced house that width is usually fixed already. In a new build, a single door with no side panel is often chosen for budget reasons, or because the architect would rather make a feature of something else on the front than of the entrance itself.

For security, a front door is the first thing many people look at, and rightly so: the lock, the hinges and the keep together decide how well it resists being forced. Ask for a version with a multi-point lock and a security cylinder if you want to put extra weight on this.

The door leaf itself is usually the heaviest part, heavier than the glass of a window of the same size. The configurator checks whether the hardware can take it for the door design and the size you enter.

Still not sure? Use the comparison with the other layouts in this group, above, to see which arrangement suits your situation best.