Traditional Bespoke Oak Doors

Period oak doors made to measure

Traditional bespoke oak doors are the period layouts, built to the width and height of the doorway you have rather than to a size held in stock. That combination matters because the houses these designs belong in are the ones least likely to have standard openings: anything Victorian or earlier was built long before door sizes settled, and a great many doorways in those houses sit outside the stock range in one direction or the other. Made to order means the design can go into the opening as drawn instead of being cut down until the proportions give way.

The layouts that read as period

What dates a door is how its face is divided, not its age. Four and six panel layouts are the ones most people picture in a Victorian or Edwardian house, with the panels set in a mortice and tenon frame and the rails placed to carry the eye across. The one over three arrangement belongs to the 1930s, where a large upper panel sits above three vertical ones and the detailing is plainer than what came before it. Boarded frame and ledge doors and ledged and braced designs come from a different tradition again, closer to a cottage or an outbuilding than a formal room.

Solid oak, and why it suits a period room

These are prime grade A solid oak doors, kiln dried before they are worked so a door holds its shape once it is hanging in a heated house. Frames are mortice and tenon jointed with the panels set into them, which is the construction the original doors used and the reason so many of them are still hanging. Because it is oak throughout rather than an oak face over a core, the grain and colour vary from door to door in the way a period interior expects. Character grade oak is available on the same designs where knots and shakes suit the room better than a clean face.

Why period houses need a size that is not standard

The problem is rarely one awkward doorway, it is that no two on the same landing quite agree. Stock doors handle that up to a point, but trimming eats into the lipping and narrowing both stiles pulls the panels out of proportion, which shows immediately on a panelled face where the eye reads panel against frame. A door built to the figures keeps stiles, rails and panels in the relationship the design was drawn to. It also means a run of doorways of slightly different sizes can all take the same design and still look like a set.

• Four and six panel layouts for Victorian and Edwardian rooms
• The one over three 1930s arrangement, with a large upper panel over three vertical ones
• Boarded frame and ledge and ledged and braced designs from the cottage tradition
• Panels set into mortice and tenon jointed frames, as the original doors were built
• Rails and panels kept in proportion at any size, rather than narrowed by trimming
• Character grade oak where knots and shakes suit the room better than a clean face

Carrying one design through the house

Matching is usually the reason people end up here rather than a single replacement, and it is where made to measure earns its keep: the bespoke designs mirror the families held in standard sizes, so an unusual opening can take the same face as the stock doors already hanging elsewhere. The rest of the range is in made to measure oak doors, and the plainer modern faces sit in contemporary bespoke oak doors if part of the house has been brought up to date. Where a doorway needs borrowed light rather than a solid face, the glazed layouts are in made to measure glazed oak doors. How the service works is covered on our made to measure doors page, and if a standard size fits after all, the stock period range is in traditional oak doors.