Customisation in Residential Builds
Custom Doesn't Have to Mean Slow
Design freedom for apartments and luxury homes. There's a quiet compromise that happens on most residential projects, and it usually happens in the door schedule.
The ceiling height gets set. The opening gets drawn. And then someone checks what's actually available at stock size, and the drawing changes to suit the supply, not the other way around. A 3.2 metre void becomes a 2.4 metre door with a bulkhead above it. A colour gets approximated. A cavity gets standardised because coordinating twelve different widths across a floor plate isn't worth the risk.
None of that is a design decision. It's a supply-chain decision wearing a design decision's clothes.
Criterion has spent decades manufacturing to spec for commercial fitouts, where non-standard openings and client-specified finishes are the baseline rather than the exception. Through Criterion Living, we're bringing that same capability to residential builds. This is what that actually means in practice.
Three Levers, Not One
Size
Our Barwon aluminium doors aren't stock sizes with custom as an afterthought they're made to the opening. If your opening sits inside the envelopes below, you don't need to design around a standard.
| Door Type | Maximum Height | Maximum Width |
|---|---|---|
| Barwon hinged — slimline, narrow & wide stile | 3600mm | 1000mm |
| Barwon hinged — at reduced height | 3000mm | 1200mm |
| Barwon sliding | 3000mm | 1900mm |
| Timber | 3000mm | 2400mm |
Refer to Criterion Industries' Systems Capacity Data for additional size information.
Finish
Aluminium can be powdercoated or anodised. Powdercoat is available across the full Dulux range, which removes the gap between the colour specified and the colour supplied. Where a finish has been selected to sit with surrounding joinery or a broader material palette, it can be matched rather than approximated.
Timber doors are available in laminate, veneer, or primed and ready to paint on site.
Configuration
The Svelte partition system, paired with Barwon doors, has become a popular option in residential projects largely on the strength of its thin reveal. The result is a refined, minimal frame that closes a space without sealing it off, maintaining the flow of natural light between zones rather than interrupting it. In residential work it appears most often in wine cellars and studies.
Apartments: Repetition Is the Constraint, Not the Ceiling
Apartment builds run on repetition, but repetition of finish isn't the same as repetition of size. A single tower carries a lot of doors across a lot of opening types: entries, cavity sliders, ensuites, internal doors. The finish schedule might legitimately be one colour from top to bottom. The dimension schedule almost never is.
Most supply chains handle this split badly. They can give you volume at standard sizes, or bespoke at low volume and the moment you want both, you're waiting on an import lead time you can't control.
Manufacturing locally to spec removes the trade-off. A consistent finish can be carried across the entire build, the full Dulux range on aluminium, or a specified laminate, veneer or primed finish on timber. And every opening, aluminium or timber, is sized to the drawing.
At The Mondrian on the Gold Coast, we supplied Caspian cavities. It's a project that demonstrates the point plainly: this is a capability that holds up at multi-residential scale, not just on one-off jobs.
Luxury Homes: The Space Dictates the Door
Detached and luxury residential inverts the problem. Volume isn't the pressure, precision is.
These are projects where the ceiling height is deliberate, the joinery is bespoke, and the finish palette has been argued over. A door that arrives 200mm short of the design intent isn't a minor variation; it undermines the room.
Here, customisation is doing something closer to visual work than logistical work. The height reads. The colour reads. The reveal between the door and the ceiling reads.
Mount Eliza Residence
At a Mount Eliza residence, we supplied a custom wine cellar using Svelte partition with Barwon doors — an enclosure that needed to be visible, sized to the space, and finished to sit with the surrounding fitout.
It's the kind of application where a standard door simply isn't an option, because the opening was never standard to begin with.
Explore the Criterion Living range Svelte partitions, Barwon aluminium doors and timber doors — made to spec for residential projects.
