Doors doors doors

and windows

The timber used throughout is New Guinea Rosewood - Sustainable Timbers of Maleny recommended this as being sustainably harvested in the Solomon Islands.

It is a beautiful golden timber with occasional red highlights and birds-eyes. It is quite stable (as far as distortions go) and works easily.

The small corner blocks have been used throughout the joinery to minimise the intrusion of right-angles. The floor plan being octagonal has very few right-angles and we wanted to maintain that feeling throughout - especially in the visually-prominently doors and windows.

The handles may appear low - that is due, largely, to the height of the doors which ranges from 2400mm to 3000mm in the entrance set.

We hung the doors before we has constructed the door sills so that we could match the brass sills to the bottom of the doors.

The Hanging

The doors are quite large and, once glazed would be quite heavy, so we hung the doors and windows before they were glazed.

This certainly made the installation easier and the subsequent glazing was no more difficult than if it had been done beforehand.

Over the years the timber has shrunk slightly so that in 2008 we had to redo the door-jambs to close the gaps which had opened up as a result of the timber shrinkage.

This was a job I had been dreading as it slowly became apparent that the timber was not going to return to its original dimensions once the wet season returned.

Especially the french-door pairs I thought would be a severe challenge as it would require one of the doors to be removed and then re hung!

After much thought I decided to do this one hinge at a time without totally removing the door and the whole process took only a few hours and worked wonderfully - the latches lines up perfectly, the gaps were closed to a nominal 2mm and the draughts were eliminated!

Draught Exclusion

During the design considerations I have absorbed the idea that a welcoming building has the doors opening inwards - it makes sense to me that when you answer a door knock the guest isn't pushed away by the opening door.

So we hung the doors to open inwards and the windows to open outwards which would let then act as scoops for any passing breeze to maximise the ventilation when the air movement was sluggish.

Another complicating concept (from my Feng Shui studies) suggested that it was important to avoid a step-up at the doors to prevent energy stagnating on the floor when it was prevented from flowing freely by raised vertical surfaces at floor level.

A Technological Solution

The inward-opening doors were a challenge to make draught proof whilst avoiding the obvious solution. I eventually decided to use brass sills to create a uniform flat surface under the door and seal the gap with inserts of nylon-brush strips which are used in sliding aluminium windows for draught-exclusion.

This worked perfectly and some of the doors even make a lovely “sssshhhh-snick” sound when they close. 6 years on the brushes are still working perfectly.