Professional Builder visits a builder installing an Eclisse Pocket Door.
If you are a fan of pub quizzes you may know that Prosecco, Tiramisu and Pinarello bicycles all originated from a North Italian town called Treviso. What you may not know is that Treviso is also the home of pocket door manufacturers Eclisse. 1989 saw this successful pocket door company grow out of an existing metal window and door framing company De Faveri, to become its own, freestanding entity.
Still a family company, Eclisse has been at the forefront of pocket door development over the past 30 years. The head office and manufacturing plant is still located near Treviso and employs more than 130 people. The company manufactures around 350,000 systems per year, more than half of which are for the export market. With 14 subsidiaries worldwide as well as an extensive network of distributors, Eclisse has truly gone global.
Apart from winning the world cup four times, Italy is well known for architecture, art and elegant design. Italians tend to be a house-proud nation and a lot of thought and care goes into the design of the interior space. So it is unsurprising that a pocket door solution that is as elegant and reliable as the Eclisse pocket door system has flourished in the last 30 years.
UK Expansion
Established in 2001, Eclisse UK has been the driving force in the development and growth of the pocket door in the UK. High quality products with competitive prices have enticed home owners and installers alike, on top of which trade discounts are available. Based in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the company has an experienced and knowledgeable Customer Service Team who are on hand to answer any technical question you may have and advise on the best product solution for any project. These company principles have been instrumental in making the pocket door less of an ‘unusual choice’ and more of a mainstream product in the UK.
Starting with the Classic Single Pocket Door System, the Eclisse range now includes more than 20 different types of pocket door as well as a wide range of accessories and surface mounted sliding door products, the majority of which can be bought online or over the phone with a free next day delivery.
We visited Andy Longdon on a site in Newark, not far from Eclisse’s Grantham base. He was fitting a pocket door in a garage extension for a client, and he was just adding some finishing touches when I arrived. “I didn’t install the pocket door all in one go,” Andy explains. He talked us through how he assembled and installed the frame as a single unit and then worked on other areas of the garage extension before plaster boarding over the pocket, installing the door and adding the timber lining kit that came with the system. He added: “If you were to just fit one from start to finish, however, it would only take a few hours. It’s so quick and easy you can’t go wrong really.”
I ask him whether that’s something that’s true for all pocket door system: “Well, to be truthful, not really. Some you end up installing one bit and having to take it off again because the quality just isn’t there. Luckily with Eclisse, you put it together once and you know it’s going to stay up.
“This pocket door was very straight forward to put together. The instructions are very easy to follow which is a bonus. I’ve fitted a few before and I’ve always been impressed. On this project, there was an existing block wall, rather than a stud wall. But that wasn’t an issue as I just ran the pocket door alongside it, with plasterboard on both sides of the frame.
“It was my suggestion to put in the pocket door, I saw the corner the door was located in and I thought, we needed to save as much space as we can here. It may be just a door to a garage, but the car’s a Porsche, so you definitely don’t want to risk swinging a door into it”.
