Sliding door or gliding door – where’s the difference? It isn’t immediately obvious at first glance because the bottom line is that both words refer to the same thing – a door that moves horizontally without swinging open, helping to enlarge your room and save space. It means that you don’t have to keep an area free so that you can open the door, thus expanding your interior design options exponentially. If required, sliding doors can even disappear into the wall, creating generous open transitions without door frames or panels.
Sliding doors allow you to make fully utilize alcoves and corners. And small rooms are not the only ones to benefit from these options – if you have a large space, then sliding doors can help create a generous look without wasting floor area. So what is the difference between a gliding door and a sliding one that fulfils all these functions too? The answer is, quite simply, that the term ‘gliding door’ is intended to underline the superior quality that characterizes a raumplus door. Because it glides when you push it. Which is why we prefer to refer to our doors as gliding, not sliding.
During their "life", sliding doors are pushed back and forth thousands of times. It is not only important that the material used meets the highest standards, but also that the system is designed from the outset so that nothing can catch, jerk or jam. In addition, the movement should be light and quiet. This is exactly what the repeatedly tested and award-winning systems from raumplus guarantee. Through constant further development and numerous internal test series, raumplus guarantees the highest quality standards for its products.
It's a completely different story with our sliding doors, which we don't call gliding doors for nothing. They glide open and closed as light as a feather. All thanks to a running technique that has been perfected over the last 30 years. Why we like to call our gliding doors sliding doors is explained the moment you set them in motion for the first time and notice that they glide almost by themselves. The same applies to stopping, by the way: The integrated gliding door brake ensures that the door brakes with the same ease. A real innovation that is especially appreciated when you have experienced how a sliding door with a heavy filling glides into its final position with momentum, without a brake or hindering human hand. A sliding door from raumplus with an integrated gliding door brake, on the other hand, brakes effortlessly even with the heaviest panels and is pulled into the intended stop position. This makes the wardrobe just as whisper-quiet as the room divider between the living room and kitchen. Opening and closing is also much gentler on materials.
Although we like to refer to our doors as »gliding«, the English language doesn’t actually differentiate between »sliding« and »gliding« doors; it is only the quality of the system that sets the latter apart from the former. And the raumplus system is unique! Which is no surprise since the goal of our founder Jürgen Guddas in the early 1980’s was to develop a profile system that met the highest quality standards. He was tired of getting angry with the sliding doors available on the market at that time, whose systems included mechanisms that were somewhere between bad and average. Guddas wanted more – a system that made life and interior design simpler and more diverse. To achieve this, he developed the Series 2000 profile, a sliding door system made from aluminum that was the perfect embodiment of the word »gliding«. This was the moment when the »gliding« was born and it still stands today for the fantastic quality of the raumplus system.
The best way to experience the fantastic quality of raumplus gliding doors is to try them for yourself. Our customers around the world are not the only ones to have done so – numerous juries have also taken a closer look at our doors and then awarded them prizes. For example, the raumplus Sliding TV Door that won the red dot award in 2019, while the S1200 LED gliding door system won two prizes in a short space of time – the 2017 Iconic Award and, one year later, the 2018 German Design Award. And our S1500 AIR gliding door received the 2015 Wohnidee Readers’ Award from one of Germany’s most popular home interiors magazines.
