Front Door

The front door doesn't need to be particularly special for an entry to be successful. It needs to be of good quality; it needs to be visually set apart; but it doesn't need to be elaborate.

That said, we wanted our front door to be something special. We wanted it to set the tone for the rest of the house: refined, simple, elegant, well designed, natural. Like the other houses in our development, we had our door designed by Christopher Lindsley, a local craftsman (who, with the commission of several dining room tables and a number of other pieces, is quickly becoming the woodworker for our development).

Designing a door is an odd process. Because of the time it takes to create the piece, and because it is nice to have a door on the house by the time you start leaving valuables inside, door design starts before a lot of the other decisions have been made. The door should set the tone of the house, but when we started designing the door, we only had a high level idea of what that tone would be.

Our first concept played upon the L-shape motif that we used on our stair tower. We envisioned something with two L's in smoky glass in a field of dark and driftwood grey wood. This initial concept had some problems. In addition to not leaving a good spot for a door handle, it felt more geometric than we wanted.

Chris talked us out of this basic concept, but we did like some of the basic ideas: light and dark contrast and a sense of flow and motion. Chris and Yuval worked with us to shape this into a couple of different designs. One, shown below, used a shifting stair step to give a sense of dynamic flow. Another option really built on the "tetris piece" theme of our initial concept and involved a lot of different sized pieces covering the door. Both of these could have been quite striking, but we eventually went a different direction. These ideas were neat, but they didn't seem quite right. Plus, when it came down to it, finding the right combination of wood to balance the sense of dynamism and simplicity was difficult. Even a single variety of wood has such variety in color and grain that combining that variation with a lot of small pieces became noisy.

We were somewhat stuck at this point. Our second design meeting ended at something of an impasse. Everyone liked different parts of different ideas, but nothing really captured our imagination. Fortunately, before our third meeting, Chris had an inspiration which took our door in a completely different dimension.

Our final design combines a simple but weighty door with a substantial surround and deep casing to evoke (but not slavishly copy) a Japanese temple gateway. The strong horizontal line of the fascia enhances that effect. The crisp but natural design evokes the aesthetic we use throughout the house with the woods providing a preview of the materials that will be encountered inside.

Eventually, the surround will be stained dark to increase the contrast with the door (the sides of the surround already are).

The downside of this design is that we gave up a bit of functionality for aesthetics (in that sense, the door isn't representative; usually we drop aesthetics before functionality). Notice the complete lack of windows by the entry. Entry windows are great for letting you take a peak out when someone comes by (is it an unwelcome solicitor?). They are also something of a security feature. In the end, we decided it was something we could live without to get the look we desired.

From the inside, the door looks more standard. The white oak door is surrounded by unstained white oak casing and adorned with a simple dark bronze handle. To add more interest, we choose to use a piece of white oak with some personality.


Overall, we are really happy with the way our door turned out. Later, we'll look at how it fits into the rest of the entry sequence.