How our garage doors are built

It starts as a finished door

Every door we build on starts as the same thing: a finished, insulated steel sectional door in four sections. Two steel skins with an insulated core between them — a sandwich, not a single sheet.

The R-Value you pick is that core. R-10.25 is an expanded polystyrene core; R-17.65 is an injected polyurethane one. Nothing else about the door changes with it.

Then a layer goes on top

That base door is complete on its own — it opens, insulates and closes without us. What makes a Modern Decor garage door is the layer we put on its face. There are three ways we do it, and they are what the model names mean.

A steel sheet skin on top

On these doors one more layer goes onto the face of the base door: a steel sheet skin, cut and folded to the design.

The door underneath is unchanged. The skin is what you see and what carries the colour, which is why these garage doors can be ordered in the same woodgrain finishes as our steel entry doors.

Where the design has glass, the opening goes through the skin and through the door behind it.

Placeholder diagram

Built this way: Concord by Modern Decor · Quadra by Modern Decor · Aperture by Modern Decor · Panorama by Modern Decor · Axis by Modern Decor

An aluminium composite panel on top

Here the layer is an aluminium composite panel (ACM) instead of steel: 4 mm panels, routed and folded, standing 5/8" proud of the door face.

It is a layer laid onto a finished door, not a different door — which is why the four section joints still read the way they do on any sectional door, and why the pattern is a real composition in a real material rather than a print.

Glass sits inside the panel, recessed to the door's own plane, and the opening goes through the door behind it.

Placeholder diagram

Built this way: Meridian by Modern Decor · Slate by Modern Decor · Onyx by Modern Decor · Staggered by Modern Decor · Mirage by Modern Decor · Linea by Modern Decor · Gradia by Modern Decor · Cadence by Modern Decor · Half View by Modern Decor

Both materials, side by side

These two doors wear both of our materials on one face — but beside each other, not one on top of the other.

The steel sheet skin goes on only where it stays visible: the field the composite leaves open. The aluminium composite panels sit directly on the base door next to it, with no steel sheet underneath them. Each material has its own part of the face, and the base door is what both of them are on.

Neither of these designs carries glass today — the drawing is done entirely in the two materials.

Placeholder diagram

Built this way: Duet by Modern Decor · Wood Band by Modern Decor

Glass goes through both

A window on a layered door is not applied to the front of it. The opening is made through the layer and through the base door behind it, so the glass sits in the door rather than on it — from the outside you are looking through the whole thickness, the same as you would on a factory door with a window in it.

Wide doors carry a vertical seam in the steel sheet skin, for a plain material reason. Every product it applies to says so on its own page and in the configurator, at the moment you pick the size.

Placeholder diagram

Doors shown as built by the manufacturer

Not every garage door we sell is layered. Many are shown exactly as the manufacturer builds them, and we fit them as they come — their construction, their insulation, their colour card.

Nothing of ours goes onto the face of these doors. Where we do fit our own glass, the opening goes through the door the way any factory window does.

See every garage door we sell →

Seeing it for yourself

Every door on this site is configured and priced on its own page, and the finish you pick is the picture you are shown. If you want the exact spacing, sizes and layout for your opening before you order, ask us for a dimensional breakdown — that is a drawing of your door, not a catalogue page.