Did You Hear the One About the Doorknob?

The last time that I wrote about doorknobs was over twenty years ago. Then, it was a satire, loosely directed at the opposite sex, for a Canadian Literature professor who, thankfully, looked past the insult and honoured me with a 97% for my effort. I’ve come a long way! My interest in doorknobs today is quite genuine for as architectural elements go, hardware is often the most overlooked.

In older homes, the original door hardware – including knobs, handles, hinges and levers – often came from Europe and there were some differences in style depending on the country of origin. In France, levered handles were used for doors and windows while the English produced the round and oval shaped handles that have influenced contemporary doorknob design.

Architectural hardware also varied in how it was made. The three main production methods were cast, forged and wrought. The process of sand-casting hardware was popular during the Victorian era and was similar to the process of rusticating concrete blocks that we examined last week. In both instances a mold was made for ease in reproduction. In this case, sand was packed around a wooden model that was carved in the desired hardware design. The mold consisted of two parts so that the model could be easily removed. Molten metal was poured into the mold. Two additional types of casting are lost wax – wax is carved and then coated with metal, when the wax melts the mold remains – and pressed casting in which metal is pressed or stamped with a pattern.

Forged hardware was a process used by early blacksmiths in which metal was hammered or rolled into the desired shape. Wrought hardware was the result of rolling metal into flat strips and then “punching” it or die-cutting it.

Before the 1800s, function, not fashion, determined the design of architectural hardware. By the time that the first homes in the area were being built a shift had taken place in which beauty and detail in hardware were preferred to the utilitarian hardware of earlier days. This was the time of the “Arts and Crafts” era in North America. Celest Cummings of the Arts and Crafts Movement website writes, “to the proponents of Arts & Crafts, the Industrial Revolution separated humans from their own creativity and individualism; the worker was a cog in the wheel of progress, living in an environment of shoddy machine-made goods, based more on ostentation than function. These proponents sought to re-establish the ties between beautiful work and the worker, returning to an honesty in design not to be found in mass-produced items”.

The Arts and Crafts door became a key element in design of the time. These doors were often wider than the standard door and they adopted a rustic, hand-finished appearance. The door knobs were typically brass or copper and featured nature motifs. Hinges were usually brass or iron. The heavy hardware stood in contrast to the natural wood of the door that was often stained to protect the natural colour of the oak or cedar of the door as opposed to painting the door.