CARRIAGE HOUSE DOORS
29 September 2008
“Break on Through to the Other Side”
What I find particularly interesting about the Arts and Crafts Movement at the turn of the Twentieth Century (for those who don’t know, both Stickley and Greene and Greene were very much part of this movement) is that the Arts and Crafts Revival has lasted considerably longer than the original movement did! But maybe it’s because we now have much more of a longing for hand-crafted items by workmen who take such a pleasure in their work that you can envision them working in a shop into which evening creeps, and the craftsman is still plugging away, completely oblivious to the setting sun and the hastening twilight, lost in a world all his own, a world of his own making, as he labors on projects that really are not work at all, because they are a passion.
The most elegant garage doors I have ever seen are actually characterized as carriage doors, and they’re made by the Real Carriage Door Company, which is located on Puget Sound in the state of Washington. As a native Montanan, I naturally think of Montana as being “God’s Country,” but, really, anyplace in the Northwestern United States qualifies for that term, and if you’ve ever seen Washington, the Idaho panhandle or Western Montana, you know what I’m talking about. And in this perfect place Don Rees has formed a company that makes doors to match the grandeur of the mountains that surround him. He likes to think of himself as “leading a renaissance in genuine carriage doors,” and he really is.
One of our unrealized dreams was to buy and refurbish a craftsman house, as there are so many of them in San Diego. Had we done so, we would have eventually had to deal with a garage on its last legs. The normal impulse is to gut it and refurbish with something new, but the better course of action, for those with the time, money, and vision, is to make it look as it once di
d, while still accommodating modern vehicles. That’s where a company like the Real Carriage Door Company comes in. They do not make fake roll-up garage doors; they make the real thing, carriage house garage doors that swing out to open. But to make them more palatable in this modern world, they do have automatic openers that swing the wooden door outward for those rainy evenings when you’ve just fought thirty miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The one thing we should be sure to point out is that they make their doors of wood (typically fine-grained Douglas Fir or gorgeous Cedar), not something artificial that looks like wood, and they use American craftsmen to make them. They then ship them across the country. Because they are doors, though, there is still some work to be done when you receive the shipment. You then have to either install them yourself, if you feel that handy, or hire someone to do it, which surely sounds like a lot. But if you’re replacing a door, you will end up having it installed by someone anyway. So, what the hell, have that workman install a superior door!
Finally, they also have a wonderfully innovative line of entry doors that deserves much more space than I am able to give them in this blog. But, again, if what you want is a wooden door with character made by someone who was so excited by the prospect of doing that work that it often kept him up at night, then the Real Carriage Door Company is the place for you. They’re more than just doors that swing open—they’re vehicles that enable you to break on through to the other side, to a time in this country when men made proud by their work was a commonplace, not an exotic rarity.
Joseph
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