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 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 which previously only we could enjoy, back at the office, before somebody bought them. We brought a small truckload full of stock from our door furniture and lighting range, including a large range of switches.

In the door furniture range, we were able to give people the opportunity to see in person our:
• Polished brass
• Antique brass
• Ormolu
• Nickel, and
• Chrome
Finishes, on doorknobs, finger plates, escutcheons, etc. Crystal often looks far too classy to match the conduct of many on St Pat’s Day (!), but our crystal door knobs were extremely popular, as were the matching crystal keyhole covers, which create a gorgeous delicate finish for your doors.

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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 you of the dedication and fascination of some people with their own chandeliers! We would like to point out that this is a preliminary list, given that we don’t have access to every chandelier in the world, and would love to hear from you if you know of any larger ones! Simply go to the contact us page, drop us an email and include pictures or links, if you can.

7th place - Rialto Square Theatre, Joliet, Illionois

The smallest biggest chandelier in the world (!) is in the United States, in the Rialto Square Theatre, Joliet, Illionois. The chandelier in the Theatre is known as the ‘Duchess’ – she took two years to be born, and cost one and a half million dollars before her birthday. That was one and a half million back in the 1920s … when you could buy a house for a person’s weekly wage nowadays. Elsewhere in the theatre, the arch between the Esplanade and the Rotunda was copied from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

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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 creator is lost in history’s fog.

Once limited to the homes of the well-to-do, and usually only available in brass, fingerplates spent the next 150 years appearing in a great variety of materials and in designs that appear almost limitless.
To mention some of the materials: these included brass, bronze, copper, tin, zinc, crystal, glass, wood (of numerous species), and ceramics. Decoration was created by casting, engraving, pressing or stamping, handpainting, transfer or the use of colour.

Styles and designs included regency, gothic, Victorian, art nouveau and art deco. Finishes provided another dazzling range of choices. Metal fingerplates may be polished and lacquered, nickel-plated or treated to resemble antique bronze, antique brass or antique iron. Timber fingerplates may be of oak, ebony, walnut or an exotic species known as cocoa wood. Timber fingerplates were often stained and then finished with shellac.

The industrial revolution brought fingerplates into the houses of the middle classes and in time they filtered even further down the social scale, bobbing up in some working class houses as if to say ‘we may be poor but we aren’t dirty’. Because our 19th century ancestors believed in the civilizing effect of decoration craftsmen and women of the time exerted all of their skills and talents in creating fingerplates of tasteful and elegant design.

Brass remained the material of choice where cost was not a matter of great importance. But by far the bigger market lay in the cottages and terraces of 19th Britain and the USA. In the period between about 1850 and 1890 the potteries of Staffordshire churned out ceramic fingerplates in numbers beyond calculation.

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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.

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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!

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