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TRADITIONAL TRADES
Making an Entrance
A small woodworking shop in Pennsylvania creates beautiful,
historically accurate doors for a variety of new old house projects.
A new old Dutch door was manufactured for a new old farmhouse.
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Text by April Paffrath Photos by Jonathan Wallen
It can be a challenge to find the right front door. It needs to stand up to the architecture and quality of the house, but it also has to enhance it. Steve Hendricks at Historic Doors in Kempton, Pennsylvania, is someone that people on a door quest rely on. Not only does his small woodworking company produce some of the finest doors, but it also collects and maintains a library of historical data about styles and embellishments.
A front door speaks to homeowners in a special way. More than any other architectural element in the house, the door is an active part of the house. People come and go, people touch it, people open it up to let in a breeze, and they close it to shut out the world for a while. "It's a point of transition between the public and private space," says Hendricks. "People recognize it as an important way to both greet the public and shelter themselves." An entryway is an architectural linchpin, too. "It should be a microcosm of the architecture of the whole building," says Hendricks.
Historic Doors began around 25 years ago as Hendricks Woodworking, a company that made custom staircases. Staircases require off-site work, and Hendricks and his team were constantly traveling to install the stairs. After a while, he migrated the focus to doors, which can be finished and installed on-site by contractors, leaving Hendricks and his team more time in their studio to research and craft their next door. "We were already building some doors," says Hendricks. "We realized that we could be an adjunct to other wood shops that didn't have that capability." By focusing on doors, Hendricks' shop gets interesting work, and other wood shops can take on an entire complex project and hire Hendricks to do the specialty doors. Hendricks runs the shop with his son Justin and does the in-house design. With a team of four or five people in the shop, and only seven in the entire company, focus is important.
Front doors were a great transition for Hendricks. "In any project, there are budget constraints," says Hendricks. "The kitchen, the pool, stairway—where do you prioritize? We chose the front entry because no one can deny it's an important element of the project." Hendricks, whose background is in history, is academic about his approach. He has done extensive research into the history of doors and entryways—mostly because no one had done much of that research before. When he started working on doors, he searched for information that would provide him with a full background and also let him know what design elements fit with different design periods. To his surprise, he found very little available, so he started collecting the information on his own. "When I went out to educate myself, there wasn't a lot to read. I would look at monographs, but photos would often leave doors in the shadows," says Hendricks, who takes—and also teaches—classes at the Institute of Classical Architecture.
Artisans create historical designs at Historic Doors in Pennsylvania.
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Historic Doors has put together a collection of Historic American Building Survey drawings, arranged by style to show door types and thumbnails of the buildings. The collection helps architects access information that is otherwise difficult to find.
Information is part of what draws people to Historic Doors. When Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, put out a call for someone to manufacture their door design, Hendricks looked over the design and found something was not quite right. The quatrefoil on the entryway was not accurate and needed some adjustment. Hendricks contacted the university and gave them information on the proper quatrefoil design so that no matter who the university chose to make the door, it would have the information to make the door accurately. In the end, Historic Doors was the university's choice, and now the company is working on its fifth project for the university. Their decorative work is not limited to quatrefoils, however. Historic Doors works on complete entryways, porticos, sidelights, and transoms. When a project requires unique work, like egg-and-dart molding or handmade carving, he contracts a specialist carver for the job so that the finished product is accurate.
Making a modern door for a historic building or for a historic-style new construction requires some adjustment in materials. Lumber today is different than it was hundreds of years ago, when there was a plentiful supply of high-grade lumber and low demand. Now the opposite is true. As a result, wood is being harvested younger and softer, so it doesn't have the same heft as wood from an earlier era. The solution they've found is to create a sturdier door from available woods through stave-core construction. They take milled lumber, saw it up, realign it for strength, and glue it together. Then they apply 1/4" solid wood over the surfaces and make mortise-and-tenon joints. This solid box of wood is much more stable than lumber available today, and much more like antique doors. The finished doors are about
1 3/4" to 2 1/4" thick, so they work with modern hardware. Doors are sanded and primed and shipped to the contractor, and generally there is a finisher on-site who will make decisions on the proper finish based on other wood on the house. The finisher will sand and stain the door, then add a seal and topcoat. Although sometimes the clients send the door off-site where a finish is sprayed on, that rapid work doesn't tend to show off the handiwork to its best potential.
Historic Doors normally uses mahogany, Spanish cedar, or white oak for exterior doors. Not only do these woods have the necessary durability, but they look beautiful and they are among the most generally available weathering woods. Custom entryways start at about $3,000 and increase depending on how elaborate the details are—for instance, size, panels, and moldings. Cost also depends on composition and materials, and can run from $10,000 all the way up to $100,000 for the most complex projects. As Hendricks points out every project is individual and cost is individual as well. "We're not a company that cranks out 64,000 doors in a single day," reminds Hendricks.
That's fine with his customers. They don't want 64,000 doors. They want the one door that means the most to them-their front door.
April Paffrath is a freelance writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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