Designing a New Old Home: Part 2
By: Simon Sarris
Tags: Home Improvement, Design, Building, Home, Home Decor

(There are many more examples of Eastlake hardware in this Brownstoner article, if you’ve never seen any before.)

One important thing to note, if you go this route and buy old hardware, is that you must order doors that are not pre-drilled. The bore hole of modern doorknobs is much larger than the small vintage rosettes and plates that are screwed to the door to hold the knob and spindle. If you do not buy pre-drilled doors, you will also have to have a carpenter bore your doors for the knobs and latching mechanisms, which will increase your cost. (With some practice, the boring and chiseling is not very hard to do, if you’re handy.)

More simply, you can just buy nicer knobs that fit modern doors. Many brands sell them, such as Emtek (sold on lots of sites including large ones like build.com), House of Antique Hardware (which re-sells a lot of brands, including Emtek), Rejuvenation, and many other places online. Nice sets can be fancy, like the Eastlake style, or fluted glass, but they can also be simpler brass, iron, or porcelain knobs that were common one hundred years ago. Buying attractive modern-door knobs cost about $50–200 per set. You are free to mix these and cheaper knobs, and for many of them you can put a nice knob on one side (like the doorknob for entering the basement, that guests would see) and a less expensive knob on the other (the doorknob you see if you’re in the basement), and by splitting up the “nice” pair, use it in two places. Note that it may not be possible to mix and match all modern brands like this, but with antique hardware it’s easy.

How much you spend on something like knobs is up to you, but my feeling is that the hardware you physically interact with, the things you touch every day, are worth the extra cost. They should be heavy and feel like solid, purposeful objects, and not a hollow piece of brass connected to a hollow door.

Speaking of doors: Try not to buy the cheapest ones! You don’t have to get solid wood doors to have them feel considerably better (heavier), you can get MDF doors inexpensively that are fairly heavy and feel good. So when looking at options, pay attention to the weight of the product.

Aside: What’s really going on here, with beautiful knobs?

I think the doors of different ages tell a story, but it is a very common story, not at all about door hardware. Door handles were once simple pieces of wood or iron, shaped into bars or balls. As time went on hardware became more ornate, and there are many pretty examples of latches and knobs not just in museums but also on medieval shops and churches that still exist today. With the industrial revolution it became even easier to create more beautiful and complex designs, like the Eastlake ones and other styles.

But then something happened: the average knob with a lock has a fair amount of internal complexity, but the beauty has been completely stripped out. We no longer think of knobs, hinges, latches, or locks as things worth making beautiful, and we think this at a time when it should be easier and cheaper than ever to make such things beautiful. When they were difficult to make, iron latches and handles resembled hands, lions, flowers, gargoyles, etc. Now that a latch is easy to make, they look like nothing. It is worth carefully pondering this, I think, beyond the words of this article and well beyond door knobs.

With all the advantages of technology, we rarely build beautiful everyday structures or everyday objects. All the progress in mechanization and materials seems to be little match for the colossal bad taste that permeates modern environments. This seems to me some kind of primal mistake. Where gods may exist in history, they walk in gardens, temples, groves, and other beautiful places that we have built and sought out for thousands of years. If we have in some part stopped trying to build beautiful places and things, why have we done so? What forces have left the world? What work can we do towards recapturing these things? I wonder these and more, I think they are very important questions that deserve all of our attention. It would take too long to wonder aloud here further, so maybe I’ll come back to this another time. For now let’s continue.

More about modern cleanliness

The obvious problem with some modern materials choices is that if they are chosen for a clean look, they often don’t stay that way. New home materials tend to get worse over time: A soiled gray carpet looks worse than a faded vintage Persian rug, a chipped polyurethane floor looks worse than old, worn wood.

Old houses harbor much of their charms in the materials themselves, which seem to get better over time, because the wear that the materials take on makes them more beautiful. Raw brass and copper grow a patina. Marble gets scratched or etched. Oiled wood floors get re-oiled, darken with age and grow their marks by getting dented. The finishes on these objects are alive. They do not soil so much as they move with time. Even raw plaster, as it is painted and broken and repaired over time, becomes more and more pretty. A dramatic example:

Image from Rose and Grey

Of course, something like this is not an easy look to pull off in new construction! We certainly didn’t try. But for old remodels along these lines there are several attractive pictures in the Architectural Digest article, The Easiest Wall Decor Idea is Leaving Them Unfinished. With new construction, unless its very well done, distressing and lots of artificial aging can look dishonest. So while I cannot recommend you prematurely age anything, consider how age acts upon your materials when choosing them. Marble countertops are rare in the US because people don’t want the maintenance or risk of etching, raw brass is rare because people prefer a solid (a “clean!”) color to a patina. When choosing countertops and hardware, we opted for marble and brass because we love the character they bring with them through the years.

Honest and Dishonest Materials

I mentioned in Part 1 that the level of honesty you put into your design is important. If you wish to build a cottage it should be simple in cottage ways and complex in cottage ways. It should aim to be cozy and not pretend to be a palace. If you build a palace it should not look folksy, or have disorganized landscaping, or plastic towel rings. You should try to think hard about what feels appropriate, and if you are trying to save money, the compromises you make should be different for different designs.

The materials you use should match what you are working with, and where you hope to build. There is nothing wrong with inexpensive materials themselves, and sometimes the cheaper option is the more suitable one. Have a look at this New Hampshire cabin kitchen, for example: