Growing up, we had a basement full of doors. There were other things, of course. There were duffel backs for summer camp, boxes of winter clothes, and cake pans of every shape and size, and a commercial-style washer and dryer, but whereas the other things were pulled up from time-to-time, or even filtered through for a yard sale, the door zone only ever got additions.
When my parents redid the basement entrance, an old wood door was added to the corner. When they put an addition on the back of the house, reconfiguring rooms to make way for our growing family, doors without a home went down to the basement. Sometimes, doors came in from elsewhere, too, pulled off the street by my father (mostly) after a contractor or homeowner tossed them to the side.
These doors all had something in common — they were 'real'. Solid wood, hand-crafted, often paneled. The finishes were deep, the passage of a century or more a story told through scratches and repairs. They were the kind of doors that make a place feel like it has been a home forever.
As we designed Eden Hill, my parent's were kind enough to give these doors purpose. Along with sinks, curtains, and hardware collected over decades and representative of centuries, we were gifted the kind of things that we wouldn't have access to otherwise.
Old doors are expensive, and here we had a treasure trove with more than just age. They carried meaning.
Now, most of the interior doors at Eden Hill have come from my childhood home. A few came from my dads curb-side salvage excursions, and one from a library that was torn out of a Greenwich, CT home more than two decades ago but that itself had previously been torn out of a castle before being shipped over an ocean.
There is also a door that we found stashed in a barn on our property, original origin unknown. And there is one we got at a salvage shop in New Hampshire, Nor'east Architectural Salvage.
Each door is a portal from the past and into a new space, and a new story. With so many more waiting to be told.
