This chapter deals with:

Doors

Has a door been moved? Look at the shape of the door and its surroundings. Are there any steps? This may hint that the door has been moved. In older properties you might even see where a door has been bricked up, in much the same way that you see bricked-up windows. In the mid-seventeenth century higher ceilings became fashionable, and the easiest way to raise the ceiling was to dig out the earthen floor – so steps going down to the front entrance may hint at a change like this. In the nineteenth century it was more fashionable to have a raised ground floor above a basement, with steps leading up to the front door.

Doors, windows and any ironwork (such as guttering) were usually painted the same colour; the finish tended to be matt or semi-gloss until the Edwardian period. Earlier doors weren’t painted at all. Georgian doors and windows were usually painted black or dark green, while some eighteenth-century doors were painted bright blue.

Batten Doors

The earliest doors were simple planked or ‘batten’ doors – that is, a row of vertical planks, with a series of planks fixed horizontally to the back of the door. There may be an arch on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century doors. As a rule of thumb the flatter the arch, the later the door. Doors from Tudor and earlier periods tend to be lower than modern doors, simply because people were shorter then. Some early doors are large enough for a man on horseback to ride through, and then a smaller door known as a ‘wicket’ door, big enough for someone to walk through, is cut into the door.

Panelled Doors

Panelled doors were introduced in the late 1500s and became more widespread in the 1600s. They tended to have square heads rather than arched. The earliest ones had two raised panels; by the eighteenth century six panels was the norm (see pictures 5.2 and 5.3 for examples).

By the mid-nineteenth century doors had four panels (the two longest ones at the top) with a rectangular window above them and by the end of the nineteenth century windows within doors (often stained glass) were fashionable.

Door Surrounds

Tudor doorways often have stone or brick mouldings above the door – these were meant to stop rain falling down the wall onto the door. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these mouldings became more geometrical, and by the 1750s doors started to have pediments and pilasters.

Pediments are low-pitched triangular gables over the top of a door; they became popular from the eighteenth century.




Pilasters are flattened columns which frame doors or windows.




Porticoes are where the entrance has columns supporting a roof.




In the eighteenth century fanlights above doors tended to have wooden glazing bars; wood didn’t weather well, so the wooden glazing bars were often replaced by lead or wrought iron. Towards the end of the eighteenth century fanlights became mass-produced with designs such as spider-webs or loops (see picture 5.3 above). In the nineteenth century these became fancier still with flower or heart motifs.

Porches may be an addition to the property rather than an original feature. Early porches were simply lean-to roofs on brackets. By the eighteenth century they evolved into porticoes and pediments, and in the nineteenth century cast-iron or trellis porches were fashionable.

Windows

Note how many windows there are. This may be useful if you’re checking window tax records, though obviously if the house has been altered the number of windows may vary in the records. Are any of the windows bricked up? This might have been a way to avoid window tax, or it might simply show that the house was altered so the window was no longer needed. Georgian builders sometimes included ‘fake’ windows so the facade of the house would look symmetrical. An example of a bricked-up window is in picture 4.7 on page 43.

Look at the position and shape of the windows. If they’re symmetrical on one side of the house, but are of a different shape or asymmetrical on the other side, the house may have been altered.

Medieval and Tudor windows tend to be rectangular with the longest edge horizontal. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was often a projected weather mould, known as a rainhood, hood mould or label mould, built over the top of the window.




From the late seventeenth century vertical windows were more fashionable and medieval windows were sometimes ripped out and replaced. Whatever the age of the property, replacement windows may be more modern than the rest of the house.

Sash windows became popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. By 1820 the standard sash windows had 12 panes (i.e. two rows of three panes in each sash). Glazing bars became thinner between the seventeenth and nineteenth century.