The 150 mm that costs a bedroom its door
A wardrobe is 600 mm deep. A door needs to swing past it. On a small plan those two facts fight, and the resolution is written on the drawing.
Why your bedroom door hits the wardrobe
You walk into a bedroom and the door stops with a bang halfway open. The timber leaf strikes the side panel of your wardrobe. You have to slide sideways through the opening to enter the room.
This happens when the wardrobe and the bedroom door share the same corner of the room. On a paper plan, the wardrobe looks like a neat rectangle drawn against the wall, and the door looks like a thin swing line. You assume both will fit.
When the carpenter installs the carcass, the mistake becomes permanent. Moving an installed wardrobe means pulling screws from masonry, damaging finished plaster, and cutting down laminated panels. Moving a door frame after plastering requires breaking a 110 mm partition wall, redoing electrical conduit, and repaving floor tiles. Fixing this clash on site costs thousands of rupees in wasted timber and lost labour.
The 600 mm depth and the 150 mm clearance rule
You need standard dimensions to prevent this clash before you order timber or lay blocks. Every clearance dimension in this layout comes from measured building rules and our planning practice.
According to our practice, a standard wardrobe must be 600 mm deep. At 600 mm deep, clothes hang square on a rail without sleeves creasing against the back panel or shutters catching fabric.
According to our practice, you must give up 150 mm of wardrobe length where an inward-swinging door must clear the wardrobe face. In our rule base, an automatic check flags any door leaf that clears a fixture by under 50 mm.
The National Building Code Part 3 sets clear corridor and general circulation paths at 914 mm. In addition, our practice requires that no door swings out into a corridor or lobby. Because the bedroom door cannot swing outward into the passage, it must swing inward into the bedroom, right toward your storage wall.
| Element | Dimension | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Wardrobe carcass depth | 600 mm | Our practice |
| Wardrobe length surrendered for door clearance | 150 mm | Our practice |
| Minimum door-to-fixture clearance buffer | 50 mm | Our practice |
| General circulation minimum width | 914 mm | National Building Code Part 3 |
| Partition wall thickness | 110 mm | National Building Code Part 3 |
How to set the wardrobe from the door swing
When you lay out a bedroom, do not measure the wardrobe position from the corner of the wall. Measure it from the arc of the door leaf.
A door leaf does not move in a straight line. It traces a circle through the room as it pivots on its hinges. That arc sweeps through floor space that many homeowners mentally reserve for storage. Because our practice prohibits doors swinging out into a corridor, the bedroom door must push inward. If you start your 600 mm deep wardrobe flush against the door wall, the door cannot open past ninety degrees.
To clear the door handle and the swing arc, our practice gives up 150 mm of wardrobe length along that shared run. The 150 mm gap provides the safety margin your door needs to swing completely flat against the wall or clear the wardrobe corner safely.
You must record this 150 mm trade directly on your drawing. If you leave 150 mm of blank space on a floor plan, a carpenter on site will see empty wall length and extend the wardrobe carcass directly into the corner. Mark the 150 mm zone as an intentional filler panel, a finished return, or an open shelving unit.
Our practice also specifies placing the wardrobe mass on the acoustic joint nearest the party wall. Solid timber and hanging clothes act as sound insulation. By placing the 600 mm wardrobe against a party wall rather than a corridor wall, you isolate bedroom noise while protecting the 914 mm circulation path through your room.
The 567 mm collision on site
Catching door clashes before construction prevents expensive structural revisions. When checking drawings for a single-storey house we drew in Narasipuram, Coimbatore district, our automated checker caught this exact failure on a bedroom layout.
In that project drawing, a bedroom door leaf struck a wardrobe by 567 mm. A human review had passed the layout because the room dimensions seemed large: 3,450 × 3,300 mm. The room had 965 mm of clear floor on each side of a 1370 mm double bed, exceeding the 914 mm circulation standard from the National Building Code. Yet the door leaf could not open fully because the wardrobe had been drawn too close to the door frame.
The 567 mm clash meant the door would have jammed more than halfway through its swing arc. Had this error reached the construction site, the builder would have had to demolish the 110 mm brick partition wall to reposition the frame, or the carpenter would have had to dismantle the 600 mm deep wardrobe and discard custom panels. Running the clearance check caught the 567 mm defect instantly, allowing the layout to be corrected before a single block was laid.
What this means for your plan
Check your bedroom drawings to verify that the wardrobe is drawn at a full 600 mm depth and placed against the party wall. Ensure that the inward door swing maintains at least a 50 mm buffer from the wardrobe edge, giving up 150 mm of wardrobe run where the swing passes. The tool applies this rule automatically when it draws your plan, checking your door swings against every fixture so you do not discover a 567 mm collision on site.
- PRACTICE: wardrobe 600 mm deep, 150 mm given up where a door must clear it
- MEASURED: our own door leaf struck a wardrobe by 567 mm before the check ran
- PRACTICE: no door leaf strikes a fixture; under 50 mm clearance raises a warning
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