These insanely confusing door bells are very simple, if you know what is happening – they sense the kinetic energy of a knock on the door, and use that to trip a circuit which rings a door bell. So basically, whenever somebody knocks on your door, they will hear a door bell sound. Argh!! It is called the Knock Knock Door Chime  - ”Who’s There? Orange. Orange Who? Orange you glad I didn’t say green!”, and it costs $49.95 (US, I assume). Personally I think it is really, really unnecessary … if you can be bothered going to the effort of installing a doorbell, and then...

Hee hee! We love the internet … that is why we work on it, all day long! It is because of gems such as this that our love for the net remains strong and true … and we don’t betray it, by doing most of our business at the shop front or other such traditional place Here we have for you some advice on lighting your kitchen … we think! If any translations of this text are offered, we are happy to accept them. Unless, that is, they have been done by a computer program! Even if anybody knows what language this has been automatically translated from, we would be happy to know...

These awesome automatic doors from Japan have a difference – which will be immediately apparent if you watch the video. They conform to the shape of your body, opening only as far as they need to for you to get through comfortably. It sounds a bit faddish and useless at first hearing, but you soon realise that the implications on energy efficiency are actually quite great. Automatic doors have become something of a necessity in modern shops, as unfortunately people need to be able to get out with full hands, they often can’t use a door handle. A door handle would obviously be the most...

When it comes to wonderful, inexplicable old mechanical door locks, Sweden has all the luck! The rust on this Swedish door lock has not only become an artistic part of it, from the photographer’s point of view, but seems to have become part of the actual structure! If it were ever cleaned, scrubbed and de-rusted, I think it might fall apart. You can tell how stiff it would be, and how many times you would have to curse at the lock to make it open, by looking at the metal spiral in the bottom left corner. This is what the key would turn … but only with much stronger fingers than mine!

Okay, this is not particularly technologically advanced … in fact, when your husband sees this, he will probably mysteriously disappear into the garage, reappearing only with a tape measure in his hand and several ping pong balls in the other … but the concept is very next century. Isn’t it??? This is the ping-pong door, which flips from the normal vertical position to a horizontal position, so that you can play ping pong on it. It is actually an inner panel that flips up and down, so you don’t need to have extra clearance on the bottom and top of your door to allow flipping. Ah...

Our first thought is that a heavy door like this would need a really heavy duty knob! Then our second thought was that, actually a really heavy door like this particular one wouldn’t need a knob at all… Perhaps a sledgehammer would suffice?

In the first instalment of our series on how your door will look in a thousand years (if it hasn’t been long frozen in a nuclear winter, rotted away to nothing or been thrown in the rubbish tip out in space), we have found a door lock which can be opened using a cell phone. However, this technology doesn’t come with those expected limitations – sure, you might be thinking, I can use my cell phone to open the door from a couple of metres away, when I could just as easily walk over there and save myself the several hundred dollars it will cost to make a mobile phone call in a thousand...

Thank you to 25 Beautiful Homes Magazine for featuring our Victorian Style Finger Plate and recommending us to their readers.