More to Doors
By Richard Porch
I know a chap who says that the happiest sound in the world is the sound of his front door slamming behind him when he comes home of an evening. Correspondingly he also thinks the unhappiest sound in the world is that of it opening again the following morning. To this person the front door is a barrier that secures his private realm and keeps the outer world at bay.
That’s certainly one way of looking at them. There has been some almighty cack written about them along the lines of; if the windows are the ‘eyes’ of a house then the door is its ‘mouth’, etc. At their most basic front doors simply control who comes in over the threshold of a given building. It is then the type of building behind it that conditions what that front door will look like and the climate within which it exists. Domestic houses will have different ones from public buildings; personal wealth will come into it as will status. So front doors are culturally significant.
Dust defence
In a photograph taken in Swansea during the 1930s, the front doors of these terraced houses in the Hafod district of Swansea functioned to keep the dust from an immediately adjacent copper slag tip from blowing into the house. This slag heap had been slowly accumulating since the 1830s and the houses had been built up against it to house the company’s key workers who were employed at the works a stone’s throw away. These houses in Aberdyberthi Street in Swansea are still there (the doors are long gone); although I’m glad to say the tip disappeared in the mid 1970s.
Sunny side up
For me, front doors are first and foremost an aesthetic experience. Impact need not necessarily reside in grandeur or expense; some of the most attractive front doors I have ever seen have been nothing more than a humble timber or metal door set in a sea of rendered walling. In places like Spain and Italy with their warm, benevolent Mediterranean climates you will see a lot of this. They can be painted warm, ochre colours and set into walls made from the local volcanic tufa or brick and rendered in ways that the bright Mediterranean sunlight transforms into something picturesque. Try that a few hundred miles north in the watery sunlight of a British winter and the result will just look downright shabby. The actual front door can often be of rudimentary construction, second-hand and secured by the crudest of bolts. It may not even have a great paint finish; in the right climate it will still look prettily distressed. If you go into the Cotswolds in places like Chipping Campden you’ll see lots of old front doors emerging from the local warm fossiliferous stone. They often look as if they really belong on sheds not front doors but they have that dreaded ‘olde worlde’ charm so deeply embedded within our culture that enables them to get away with it.
From domestic to corporate
What goes on behind the front door changes over time too. What were once grand private premises in the Georgian period have now become inscrutable corporate headquarters; see Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. Here you can see immaculately maintained front doors contained within a classical doorcase made of timber and stone. Above them curves an inevitable bat-wing fanlight whose glass is held in place with the thinnest of glazing bars. The front door is finished in some rich gloss paint and the ironmongery is brass and similarly classically derived. The inhabitants behind them are now construction companies, solicitors or the like.
Such front doors exude an aura of respectability and are a quiet display of wealth and position which a Georgian façade carries off so well. On a domestic level Aberaeron is good at this too. There is a short terrace in Tewkesbury with narrow front doors, one has a crude little canopy and the other does not. They both exude a jauntiness that belies their age and condition.
Doors in the wall
Other front doors to the street control access to private gardens and semi-public space. You see a lot of this in Edinburgh’s Old Town where impressively constructed doors are ornamented with metal studs and vision panels. The latter serves two purposes; firstly they allow the owner to scrutinise who is calling and secondly they allow a putative visitor to see a controlled view in. Although too small for anything but a particularly athletic cat to climb through they are often barred which is a nice Gothic touch. Seen in context such doors look like fortified entrances to a private kingdom beyond – which is exactly what they are of course. They normally sit within the context of a high masonry wall and are frequently framed by nothing more than a simple stone moulding.
In Dolgellau I found a front door, which although of very humble construction was perfectly suited to the building behind it. It was in the old part of the town where the housing appears to have grown up organically around old paths and walkways. As I walked past one with a house name of ‘Victoria Works’, I saw a pale gray door and surround that appeared to emerge from the wall it was set into. Six square window panels each subdivided into rectangles of coloured glass admitted light and gave the door a sense of playfulness. Two rather chunky steps lifted you to the threshold of this door and you stood beneath a dauntingly heavy-looking lintel stone. As is typical in this part of Dolgellau the stonework of the house is of a massive quality as if built by giants.
The door as public art
The modern need not be equated with the garish or unsuitable. In Ruthin at the new Crafts Centre I saw a ‘front door’ which was actually commissioned as a piece of public art. The artist was in fact a jewellery designer called Brian Podschies and the result is a folding two-part mesh screen that responds cleverly to the challenge posed by the wide front entrance to the Crafts Centre. It allows maximum visual permeability into the internal courtyard while securing the building from intruders...inspired. Ruthin has an old town too and what a discovery it is. Aficionados of front doors will not be disappointed as they have a fine selection of 18th and early nineteenth century classical front doors with superb door cases to go with them. I spent a blissful half-day last summer walking around Ruthin and would recommend a walk around the old town and the castle to anyone.
*This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in About Wales the journal of the Civic Trust for Wales, July 2010.
Richard Porch 2010.
