In the olden days – when people were antiques – low-hanging light fixtures were common. Traditionally, houses had much fewer windows and skylights were an absolute rarity, because of the higher cost of heating and cooling. People were also shorter on average in these times! If your old home has low-hanging light fixtures, either over tables, or just out in the open, there is an easy, 1-person method for getting them out of the way. Provided your fixtures are on chains, grab a piece of heavy-duty baling wire and snip off a 4” (10cm) length. Pull the fixture up so that the lowest link of the...

We are so pleased to have had our door knobs mentioned in Newsweek as one the most unique and stylish around – not to mention getting pride of place in the article, with just as much space as the entire text has! The door knobs featured are replicas of Louis XVI style door knobs – if you couldn’t tell from the intricate detail and patterning on the knob that it would look right at home in a castle. Newsweek has acknowledged what we have been telling you for so long now, that door knobs can smarten up (or dumb down!) the look of an entire room. They are your first tactile experience of a...

One of the technical aspects of buying door hardware which is sometimes overlooked, to the sound of wails and moans, is fitting the handle you like to the lock that is already on your door. You may be in for more than you bargained for if you buy some gorgeous handles, whether they are reproductions or originals, and find that you need to replace all of your locks to use them… Hopefully you are in a position to first choose all of your door handles, and then get locks to match – since the door handle is the part of you that expresses your personality and originality. It is hard to imagine your...

Door knobs are a feature of your home that everybody notices, because nearly everybody that comes into your home must touch and utilise them. People will notice their look, and how that works with what is around it, and they will notice their feel … whether they are made of a cold material, whether they are comfortable to open, how fragile they seem, and even how clean they are. Unfortunately, how clean your door knobs are is often something you won’t notice until that rare day when you go around and clean them, and you can feel how bad they must have been beforehand! Door knobs made recently...

Perhaps the world’s most unusual chandelier is in the ossuary in Sedlec, in what used to be Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. It may seem, when you first look at it, to be the world’s most macabre chandelier – perhaps a relic of a long-forgotten Church of Satan – but it is not. The cemetery there at one time had some earth from Golgotha, the hill on top of which Christ was crucified, sprinkled on it. Soon, people from far and wide wanted to be buried with the soil which might have held Christ’s blood. So the cemetery outgrew it’s original capacity, and especially during the Black...

So dedicted to our work, and involved in the world of antiques are we here at Architectural Classics, that how do you think we spent most of our St Patrick’s Day? Not making ourselves green with imbibing too much Guinness; instead, like St Patrick did, we spent it converting those unfamiliar with the joys of antique door fittings into the ranks of the enlightened! In fact we spent a total of five days at the Spring Home and Garden Fair in Dublin, in wonderful company showcasing the best new and established products for your home and garden. It was a great opportunity to show off all the things...

Chandeliers have been a symbol of opulence and affluence for so long, that man has discovered strange, beautiful and most of all, monster-sized ways to make them! While we are well aware that it is not always size that counts most in how impressive something is, we’ve compiled this preliminary list of the 7 biggest chandeliers in the world, to give you a bit of inspiration about your own at home. While yours may not be architect-designed, and if it were a hundredth the size of one of these, still mightn’t fit through your front door, it’s your own! It’ll be a tiny piece of luxury, to remind...

For an object with an extremely humble purpose the humble fingerplate brought a touch of beauty to the doors of old houses from around 1800 to the 1940s. It began life as an elegant but plain piece of polished brass, perhaps with a discreet decorative border or a little reeding, in the homes of the Regency elite. Its role was to prevent the offensive marks that the unwashed fingers of the time left upon the painted finish of doors in the entrance hall and better rooms of houses of the period. As with so many unknown and unheralded inventors of the past, the identity of the fingerplate’s...

It seems that lovers of antiques are also lovers of good food, good drinks and good atmosphere – due to the popularity of Twenty-Two Doors in Seattle. Twenty-Two Doors is a bar that got its name from the 22 doors which make up the counter and back bar cabinetry, as well as the bi-fold doors characteristic of western pubs.

For those of you that have read our articles on door hardware, and especially the one discussing the benefits of lever handles versus round door knobs, this movie might give you a bit of pause for thought! You can see the dog is so determined to get out, that not having a lever handle on the door definitely won’t stop him!