Do you ever lie awake at night, just waiting in fear for the Incredible Hulk to come smashing through your door and carry you off over the horizon? Do you worry about stray bullets or hand-launched rockets coming whizzing through your bedroom door, smashing you to smithereens? Well, you could be resting a lot easier if you had the same technology that Barack Obama has protecting him in the presidential Cadillac! The doors on the new US president’s Cadillac One are armour plated, and weigh as much as the cabin door on a 757 Boeing jet does. That’s quite a lot. You couldn’t lift...

We love drooling over unusual houses here at Architectural Classics. We’d probably do it much more often, but we keep shorting out keyboards and having to replace them. The boss gets a bit piddled when you are working on a laptop … anyway! Here’s an old house with a difference - a crucial one! It is made entirely out of old doors! Well, just about entirely. The roof is not made out of old doors - although that would have been a superb idea, they could have had skylights all through the house, at no extra cost! Make it a screen door and you’d be all set. We are not sure if all...

Have you ever felt that karma is trying to balance itself through your doors? That every squeak on a windy night that keeps you awake is penance for something that you aren’t quite sure what it is? That perhaps that time the car door slammed on your fingers in the wind wasn’t just an accident? Well, here is an even more clear-cut example of the gods working through the doors! Perhaps this guy had slammed one too many doors in his own house - perhaps he cruelly neglected a polished finish on his lever handles or left loose screws to flap about in a backplate - whatever he did, Janus...

You want your home design to stand out from the crowd? To be a bit different to your friends? Have a home that is completely unique? (well, almost … there is at least one person that has created this effect before) … Just dig a few feet of earth out from under the foundations of one side of your house. No, the effect of uniqueness does not come from the fact that one end of the house is completely open to the air, with open-brick features (lying around on the ground!) and splintered exposed beams. It works, honest, I’ve seen it Mum! The Crooked House pub in England has used a structural...

You’ll sympathise with the dog in this clip if you are one of those people that always reaches for door handles at the height they are set to in your own house, and also if you have ever walked into an exceptionally clean glass door! The glass has been removed from a front door, while the outer frame of the door has been left there. The dog still waits for the door to be opened to go out, despite the fact that his owner walks through the hole in the door in front of him. Definitely a creature of habit, and conditioned to Pavlov’s own standards! It does seem rather cruel after a while...

Back in Ought-Seven, we wrote a post about a chandelier from St Donat’s Castle, which was once owned by William Randolph Hearst, and is currently in the possession of Patte Barham, daughter of Frank Barham (once editor of the Los Angeles Tribune). We were looking for the history of this item as well as its rightful owners, which was given away from William Randolph Hearst’s collection before his company fell on hard times several decades ago. However, we won’t regale you with all of the details of that story - only thank the blogosphere for the excellent response we got! We were...

If your house is stocked with our super-stylin’ door furniture, you won’t be forgetting to shut the door. In fact, you won’t be missing a single opportunity to run your fingers over their surfaces from smooth to sexily textured, grasping every twist and fold … allowing them to pivot on their fluid, fabulous hinges … Ahem. Excuse me. As we were saying, forgetting to shut the door is often the stuff of obsession. Especially if you have just left on a month-long holiday, you’ve gone to an important meeting and aren’t sure whether the dogs can reach your daughter’s...

We have often lamented the woes of door-to-door religious exponents on this blog. However, we usually do it in a little more polite language than John Safran, who really, really doesn’t like having to answer the door before noon on a Saturday. In this video he says : “I don’t remember that part in the New Testament, where Jesus says ‘Go around and annoy the s**t out of people by bashing on their door! I don’t remember in Deuteronomy 13:11, blessed is the man who goes around bashing on people’s doors at all hours of the morning, for he truly is Jesus’ little...

While this metal’s name can sound more like a primary school insult, or the name of your country cousin from down Miss’ipi way, it actually has a long, illustrious and extensive history! Pewter is an alloy of tin and copper, and has been used for crockery, utensils and ornaments commonly for at least six centuries. If you have and love your pewter hardware at home, here is the 401 on pewter The types of pewter for varying uses differe mainly in the amount of copper used to alloy with the tin. While lay pewter (which cannot be used for eating or drinking from – but can be used for making...

At last, a technological advancement that complements traditional hardware, instead of making it obsolete! True, these automatic swing door openers from Otodor mean that you don’t have to use the door handle if you don’t want to. Or, if you can’t – in the case of people with restricted mobility or hand motion. However, they do incorporate ‘ordinary’ door handles, and their images on the website are of doors with ordinary handles – avoiding that horrible blank look of a door with no knob. It’s sort of like looking at a face without any eyes, don’t you think?! Retaining the knob...