Top 40 Best Kitchen Pantry Door Ideas – Storage Closet Designs

The pantry has long been the time-honored mainstay of the well-equipped kitchen, that bastion of comfort and nourishment.

An organized and fully stocked pantry is indispensable to the culinary enthusiast, and while many are content to leave it at that, why not take it one step further and create the kind of pantry that stops people in their tracks?

Believe it or not, it’s not such a tall order.

The pantry is like any other room or corner of the house where decorative appeal is concerned; it too carries the potential to make a style statement, and further reflect your home’s design scheme. From farmhouse rustic to sliding glass sleekness, your pantry door can be one more gateway into your home’s resplendence.

Stripped barn wood, French cabinetry, and even parted curtains suggest that your pantry is more than just a storage unit, but proof of your cucina prowess.

Whether your pantry is small and simple or akin to a walk-in closet, today’s designs ensure that every entrance is one worth remembering.
The kitchen is the epicenter of the home, a place of gathering and replenishing both stomach and soul. For the man who often entertains just beyond the stove, no detail is too small for reconsideration.

Just as you wouldn’t seat your guests at a dirty table or allow them to bear witness to faulty kitchen equipment, you surely wish to present your pantry in the manner it deserves.

After all, these top 40 best kitchen pantry door ideas are where the fruits that will contribute to your labor are produced—why not show them off like the pro you are?

1. Wood Pantry Doors

Wood doors fit in a huge array of kitchen spaces, especially when used for a pantry. Modern, classic,  and rustic kitchens can all benefit from switching an existing pantry door over to one of a wood variety.

Even if the other doors in your kitchen are painted a particular color, a contrasting wood door stained an attractive and contrasting shade can be an awesome feature that stands out from the rest of the room. Having a pantry is a luxury, and there’s no shame in drawing attention to yours.

If you’re purposely attempting to mismatch your pantry door from the rest of the house, it might be a good idea to go with a different look entirely. Take this as the opportunity to use a certain style of door that you’ve always wanted but didn’t have the right place to try it.

Wood doors can come in a variety of styles, and be hung in different ways as well. You’ll find them on sliding tracks, traditional hinges, pivot hinges, and pocket-door recesses. They can be fitted with glass inserts, screens, or they can be constructed as solid slabs. Anything goes with wood pantry doors.

 

2. Farmhouse Pantry Doors

The idea of a pantry lends itself so well to the farmhouse-aesthetic. These country-style homes’ kitchens are usually a simple but elegant design, which allows a wide range of doors to be used for closets, pantries, and other storage spaces. They can be a little distressed and rustic, so you don’t have to break your back by paying attention to every little detail.

If you’re going for the farmhouse look on your pantry door, there are some easy ways to make it look like it’s seen more than its fair share of harvests. If you already have an existing door, you can use methods to antique and distress it, providing a broken-in but new look for the space. This video has some great pointers and techniques on how to achieve this look:

 

Consider using matching antique and distressed signs and decorative items for around the door to add that extra country feel. If you’ve got some door hardware that was original to the house, think about how you can make that work for the door as well. Hinges are easy to fix, while door knobs might not be, so think about reaching out to a locksmith to see if they can rebuild the hardware for you.

 

3. Barn-Style Pantry Doors

Barn doors have taken a huge step forward in the last ten to fifteen years. Once believed to be a short-lived trend, they’ve shown remarkable versatility with some serious staying power. Mounted on sliding tracks, these doors are slid out of the way to open them, and pulled back when you need them shut.

What makes barn doors so attractive for a kitchen pantry is that they don’t have to take up valuable floor space when opened, making the flow in the cooking area less obstructed and easier to work in.

 

While you can buy barn door kits complete with all the required hardware at stores like Home Depot, you can save quite a bit by tackling the project yourself. Due to this project’s popularity, there are a ton of great videos on YouTube to show you how it’s done. The following video will not only show you how to build the door, but also how you’ll save a bunch of money doing it yourself. We’re talking a couple of hundred dollars here, so it’s definitely worth taking a look:

 

4. Pantry Doors with Glass Windows

We all want the bright, cheery kitchens that we see in home magazines, but the reality is that you may not have the windows and natural light to make that look work. There are options besides adding lighting fixtures and poking holes in your exterior walls.

Adding reflective surfaces has been a trade-secret in the design world for years. For instance, adding a mirror to a wall across from a window will reflect the natural light that the room already has into the rest of the room. This makes the room feel bigger and brighter. You can pull this off with your pantry door as well.

 

Choosing a pantry door with a glass window insert is a great way to brighten up a kitchen, while also making your pantry stand out just a little. The glass panes make great places to try an adhesive decal with your favorite quote or a litany of other patterns and ideas.

If you’re worried that a glass window in your pantry door will reveal the chaos that exists behind it, you’re right, it will. You can take a few steps to avoid that though. For one, you can use a frosted glass film to coat the backside of the glass. This makes it much harder to see through, and unless something is right up against the glass, you won’t be able to make out anything behind the door. You can also hang a curtain across the glass on the inside of the door, giving the pantry a cottage feel.

 

5. Chalkboard Pantry Doors

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything that we have going on. For some of us, if we don’t write it down, we won’t get to it at all. Luckily, chalkboard paint, one of the most popular kitchen DIY products available, can help solve this issue.

In many kitchens, chalkboards are an important part of not only the kitchen’s design but also how a family keeps track of things. Chalkboard paint can turn any flat surface into a notepad, design studio, menu, or welcoming message board. The application is easy, requiring no more effort than standard paint. The result is a surface that you can scratch a few ideas out on or use to keep track of what you’ve run out of in the pantry.

Using chalkboard on your pantry door is a fun way to add some interest and functionality to your kitchen. Sure, your door effectively divides two spaces, but how much more useful would it be if you could leave important messages or keep track of items you’re running low on. Even better, kids love these chalkboard surfaces, so they can stay busy while you’re trying to get dinner together. 

 

6. French and Double Pantry Doors

Sometimes tight spaces call for thinking outside of the box. If a full-size pantry door would interrupt the flow of your kitchen, you should consider taking a few ideas from this category.

Depending on where your pantry is situated, opening the door could require you to take an awkward back step, shuffle, or angle before you can get the door open and pull from the shelves. Now, if you replaced that single door with a set of French or double doors, you’d be able to take a step that’s half as awkward, and that could make all the difference in the world. This can be a massive improvement to your kitchen’s overall functionality.

One thing to keep in mind when shopping for doors for this project is that French doors don’t always come in sets of two. A French door is actually considered any door with several glass panels from the top of the door to the bottom. To pull this project off, you’ll need a set of French doors, but they won’t be hard to find. 

Don’t be afraid to take a swing at building some double doors for yourself. They don’t have to be overly complicated, and you can use plywood as the main backbone of the door. There are some excellent tutorials available to show you how it’s done. If you’re a DIY kind-of-guy, do a little research and see if this project is within your realm of capabilities.

 

7. Matching Pantry Doors

A pantry doesn’t have to look like another room, purposefully built, and separate from the rest of the kitchen. If you plan your kitchen renovation to include a pantry, you can build it right into the floorspace you already have. This can produce a seamless flow of cabinets without detracting from the design or designating precious wall space for a doorway.

Creating a pantry that looks just like your other cabinets is a smart way to provide extra storage without a complicated structural renovation. The size and structure of the cabinet are actually rather arbitrary here. The real goal is to find, build, or consign a cabinetmaker to build matching doors. 

If a new look is in the works for your kitchen, you can consider this option. There are many companies online that will build cabinet doors to your specs and ship them to you. You could build your perfect pantry cabinet, and have one of these company construct brand new doors for all your cabinets. While not inexpensive, it’s an effective and easy way to ensure that your pantry cabinet door matches everything else.

 

8. Screen Pantry Doors

And now for something completely different. If you’ve never considered using a screen door for your pantry entryway, this article may change your mind. These screen doors can make awesome additions to small kitchens. They’ve been popular in restaurant kitchens for years as they’re easy to open when your hands are full, allow plenty of air movement, and most importantly of all, you can see through them to avoid crashing into someone with their arms full of food.

Maybe you don’t need all the flexibility and function that a screen pantry door can offer, but the look alone may be worth the move. You can choose a simple design from off of a home center shelf, or you can design and build your own. They can be fitted with closing-mechanisms as well, to ensure that they close after you’ve passed through with whatever you needed to get from the pantry. 

If you’d like to try your hand at building a door, a screen door is a great place to start. These are very light doors, so if your joinery isn’t spot on, it shouldn’t end in catastrophic failure. For an excellent, in-depth tutorial on how to make this work, watch this video:

 

Kitchen Pantry FAQs

How can I build a pantry in my small kitchen?

Depending on your design, there are a number of ways to build a pantry area in your kitchen. The simplest solution is to designate an existing cabinet to pantry-use only. You can also add open shelves that allow you to store your dry goods on the wall. Another more complicated solution could be lying within your walls. Consider using the space between the studs in your walls to build and recess shallow cabinets that can hold spices, pasta boxes, and other small items.

How big does my kitchen pantry need to be?

The answer here is as big as you can make it. An entire room devoted to pantry storage will never have an empty shelf. But any small space can serve as a pantry. A shelf, a closet, or an extra cabinet can all be used as pantry spaces, so you should worry less about how big to make your pantry and more about how to make the most of the space that you have.