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Continuing Education Use the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading this month’s ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / AIA Continuing Education article. Learning Objective: After reading this article, you will be able to: 1. Describe innovations in glass doors. 2. Discuss style trends in entry doors. 3. Compare materials available for entry doors.

Combine art-like glass with a variety of wood species not traditionally found among door manufacturers’ catalogues (not long ago everything was oak), and doors become an art form — part design, part sculpture and totally original. Fine art you can touch every day, say door manufacturers. Every time you come home.

 

Contemporary IWP® door with art glass crafted by glass designer Shelly Jurs (style #262)

Collaboration between high-design door manufacturers and glass pioneers like Shelley Jurs has resulted in an explosion of new styles and combinations that permit the designer, for the first time, to make a wide range of architectural statements. Furthermore, style has been enhanced by functionality. Today’s doors are generally stronger, more energy efficient and more resistant to weather than in years past.

Manufacturers say new door lines combine “age-old architectural details” with modern-day lifestyle conveniences. There is a growing reliance upon new materials in the new door lines, and even traditional solid hardwood doors have new faces. As a result, architects have many more choices today than they did just a few years ago. Oak once dominated the hardwood door market. Today’s doors, increasingly, are made from a broad range of wood species: vertical grain Douglas fir, Western hemlock, mahogany, cherry or maple, to name a few.

 

IWP® Estate™ door (style 1321) with iron-accented sidelights (style #1101)

“Mission architecture, or Shaker architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright or Craftsman style construction, whatever you want to call it, is very popular now,” says the spokesman for a West Coast manufacturer. “As a result, there is a considerable outpouring by door manufacturers to keep pace with that new trend.”

Today’s Doors Are Cleaner, Larger

The new doors are characterized by “cleaner” lines and squared sticking, in many cases, flat, rather than raised panels.

Knotty or distressed doors, both for interior and exterior applications, once very limited, are finding their way into new homes across the country. The stylistic swing has spurred U.S. door manufacturers to broadly expand product lines, and to incorporate systems designed for ease of installation. At the same time, low maintenance is coupled with the energy efficiency of modern materials.

The new style lines offer the customer a wide variety of options: door shapes can now be flat on top, Gothic, segmented or radius-top. They come in more than two dozen stain and finish color options, with either smooth, heavy-textured wire brush, hand hewn or distressed finishes. Entryway doors, once nearly universally sized at 3’0” by 6’8”, are larger — three-and-a-half feet wide and up to eight feet in height. The new larger doors were once a custom item, but are now readily available within the same schedule as conventional-size doors.

The new pre-hung doors typically are sold with hardware and other door components — doorframe, jamb and moldings - made from the same wood stock.

One manufacturer’s new Craftsman-type doors are available in maple, cherry, oak and alder and come in four designs with extra-wide six-inch stiles and flat panels held in place with square molding. The doors can be matched with sidelights and transoms to create complete entry systems.

Craftsman styling is enjoying a renaissance that is apparent among door manufacturers. The design origins are in the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in England and America. The mass production of the industrial revolution was rejected in favor of art and architecture crafted by hand of natural materials. The movement reshaped American architecture and furnishings, and from the late 1800s through the 1920s, U.S. artisans adapted the distinctive Craftsman look to small houses and bungalows and to the furnishings inside. Now those same styles are being replicated.

When determining door designs, it is important to consider the finish that will be applied. Different stains or varnishes can draw out highlights and grain patterns unique to each wood species.

Generally, hardwoods tend to stain more evenly than softer wood, such as pine or fir, and various species of wood vary in the grain type (close-grain or course-grain) and in the grain pattern. Some grain patterns are more distinctive than others.

Alder, cherry and maple are close-grained (or tight-grained) species. They look good with a clear varnish or a whitewash stain.

Cherry, alder and mahogany all stain very evenly. They look nice dark stains (such as a chappo or merlot.)

Oak has a coarse grain pattern, is distinct when stained in warmer colors such as chappo or wheat. The distinctiveness of the grain pattern in oak is emphasized when stained in darker colors like dark cherry or ebony.

Walnut has a very beautiful grain pattern—not as coarse as oak. Walnut is a dark wood when unfinished, so a clear varnish or a chappo color work well.

 

Nord® double-door entry system (style #4681) with coordinating transom (style #7681)

Ordering the door prefinished from the manufacturer often yields a more professional, longer-lasting finish, according to one manufacturer.

Manufacturers have recently begun to offer a new line of Western hemlock doors, available in sizes up to seven feet in height. Unlike other woods, Western hemlock contains no pitch or resin, so there is little chance of “pitch bleed” which can mar the finished surface of other wood doors. And Western hemlock grows harder with age, which means that doors made of it can withstand heavy wear and tear. Western hemlock has a naturally light color that will not darken with age, which makes it a good choice for a variety of finishes ranging from light to dark.

Compression Glazing for Strength, Ease of Maintenance

New exterior French doors are specially constructed with low-e thermal pane glass glazed directly into frames, making them unusually weather-tight and secure. The glass is inserted directly into the stiles and rails of the door, which are then assembled like a puzzle. Glass inserts have traditionally been installed only after the wood portions of the door were completely assembled; in contemporary “compression-glazed” doors, glass is installed and assembled in much the same way as the door’s wood panels. Compression-glazed glass thus becomes an integral part of the door.

“We can get a better seal around the glass, and we have greater control over the appearance through mechanical compression glazing,” says a manufacturer. Compound beads are uniform, miters are much more exact and mechanically glazed doors perform better in all kinds of weather.

The chance of a seal failure in the new doors has been greatly reduced over doors with traditional glazing, according to manufacturers, and compression glazing results in a stronger door because corner joints fit with a higher degree of exactness.

Up to three-quarters of all doors made today by some manufacturers are compression glazed. The change is relatively recent. As little as five years ago, for instance, glass was installed in 90 percent of all doors only after door assembly was complete.

While true divided lite doors may be beyond the budget and also diminish energy efficiency, new products simulate the look and effect of traditional divided lite openings, but employ modern energy efficient technology and increased weather resistance. Manufacturers have responded to a new demand for a traditional look with a number of options. Systems that employ more substantial mullions and patterns that replicate true divided lites and which can be accessorized with sidelights and transoms. There are also fixed units in a variety of shapes and sizes to help designers achieve the look of historical accuracy.

Simulated divided lite grilles, applied directly to full-frame, tempered glass in many of the new lines, also decrease the chance of seal failure, and because full-frame glass has only four sealed edges, the modification of traditional divided lite doors makes for an extremely rigid door structure.

An added side benefit is that single-sheet tempered glass doors require fewer unsightly, but federally mandated, “tempering bugs,” the engraved labels specifying ANSI compliance. On a 15-lite design, for instance, tempering bugs have been reduced from 15 to one.

 

Super stable MDX thermal panel with beautiful bookmatched real wood veneer

New door lines frequently feature extra-wide stiles that can accommodate a greater variety of lockset options and provide decorating flexibility. Typically, stiles are engineered with finger-jointed cores and selected face veneers to provide strength and greater overall stability. Moisture and impact tests confirm it, say manufacturers.

Quality is worth searching out in entry doors; look for precisely matched miter joints. Designers can choose traditional edge-glued solid wood panels with precise detail and shadow lines, or bookmatched veneer on top of exterior-quality, medium-density fiberboard (MDX) panels for high stability and warp resistance.

In decorative glass, designers can choose from waterglass, baroque, gray baroque, clear beveled or clear seedy glass, and expanding new styles means that now, more than ever, you can match doors to architectural design, whether its Early American, English Tudor or Contemporary Ranch, Colonial, Craftsman, Rustic Country or Mission Mediterranean.

High-style door designs may have as many as nine different decorative glass textures, patterns and colors and be assembled with either brass or lead caming. Today’s exterior-application glass is typically 5/8” thick and triple-glazed-decorative glass is encased between two pieces of tempered, clear glass.