From here on out I’m going to refer to the shoes by my native Australian term of thongs (just a warning for those of you who speak a different English!), and ignore the potential sniggers about what I do with what would be underwear, in a different part of the world.

Researching for this post, I also discovered an additional share-worthy piece of information - that thongs were actually popularised in 1907 in Brazil, when Havaianas’ parent company began producing cheap, simple sandals for people working on coffee harvesting in the hot weather. There you go! The blue collar, working roots of the shoes show when you wear them, they are the most comfortable thongs I’ve ever owned. End plug, cash cheque from company.

Anyhoo, these doormats by Havaianas now let you keep your shoes not just next to the doormat, but INSIDE it. Yay! How cool. If you are like me, constantly slipping your thongs on and off and losing them, now you’ll always know where they are. Just keep your mat out of the way of dog-poopy, muddy and gravelly feet, and pop a tripping hazard warning sign up next to it, and you’ll be ready to go!

Via TrendHunter

At Architectural Classics, we love doors, and see them as an art of their own. Just like the human body, we reckon they look pretty good without all the bits, bobs, accessories and makeup (apart from essential usability items, like handles and knockers … also non-negotiable on the human body ). However, this door art was so stunning, we had to pass it on.

From Rachael Hamm, the door was a piece of architectural salvage of sorts. Although rather than being taken from an old, or about to be demolished house, it was beside a dumpster. Can’t beat that price!

The photos in the door were taken by the door-artist herself, in America’s Pacific Northwest. If you decide to replicate this piece, though, we had a few other ideas - like taking one large photo and splitting it up over the five panels, or perhaps having your kids draw something for the panels. Let them do another one every year, and you’ll have those memories of them at their height of cuteness, before the isolation and evil of the teenage years sets in, and this door starts being slammed in your face instead of decorated .

For the DIY-ers, we have few details, apart from the fact that the photos were placed on the door before the painting process. This is presumably so the bright colour didn’t show through the pale areas of the black and white photos. The photos were layered, also … I am assuming that just means that she printed them several times, and glued them on top of one another, or perhaps cut out elements, and glued them over themselves in the photos. The borders on the photos are a neat trick to hide imperfect edges with the painting.

Great idea, leaving the door handle on … but we’d love to see it in use even more! This door art is currently mounted on the wall - that dark corner in the top left is the ceiling. If you’re going to mount your door art, make sure you put the nails or brackets through your wall’s studs, not just the plaster. You could have a plaster disaster :-).

Happy making, and feel free to send us pictures of any door art that you make!

Via RowHouse Blog

Sadly, though he has ‘gelata’ in his name, there are no pictures of ice-cream on his site.

We do have to thank the Desire to Inspire girls for putting us onto Guido, a man with more style in his clicking finger than we have on several pages of our website put together! (Well, he couldn’t possible have more style than a whole enormous website full of sexy and stylish door knobs, locks and knockers ). If nothing else, his pictures really inspire you to try to create some texture in your home, to not be afraid to mix up styles, fabrics, finishes and colors. Everything will end up with some sort of unity, because it all came out of your precious little head!

If you’d like to see more by Guido, I highly recommend checking out his wibagency site as well as his personal site. Not only does his photo in the WIB Agency site look much more approachable, and less like the son of a Mafia don, but there are extra pictures that you can’t find on the portfolio on his own site. The Desire to Inspire team also turned up some pics that must be older, and are a little fuller. They give you a broader range of home decor items to be inspired by … although you will notice the man has a bit of a thing for floral chairs!

While there is a dismal, perhaps even depressing lack of prominence for doors, handles, locks and hardware in his pictures (open doors have so much potential and promise in them!), we’ll forgive him. Just a little bit. Check him out, and if you love Guido Barbagelata, we recommend the Fersa range of cabinet knobs, lever handles and door knobs, with their definitive, exotic stylings.

Folding sliding doors can make for a really unique feature in your home, letting in plenty of fresh air and light, and making for stunning views. Plus, you get to put ordinary door handles on them - no reduction of your range options!

Folding sliding doors take up minimal room when they’re opened, and are usually made of glass. Unless, that is, you are in a primary school, and the folding sliding doors are those fabric-covered, accordion style ones *shudder*.

You can even get much smaller, dual panel folding sliding doors. These are recommended for spaces where a swinging door would be in the way - there might be a wardrobe or workspace that begins immediately next to the door. Even if there isn’t existing obstacles to your ordinary swinging doors, replacing them with folding-sliding doors can open up a whole new world of space in your home, and allow for much more balanced layouts. You can have your folding-sliding doors manufactured from plain old wood, rather than glass, for more privacy and better sound proofing. Or you can have them made with awesome etching and glass effects, in places where privacy isn’t an issue - check out the cascading sea on these folding sliding doors! )

They’re great from a home design point of view, but there are a couple of downsides to them. If you live in an extremely dusty or windy area, there is a lot of vacuuming dirt out of the track to do, or else you’ll have to listen to the crunching squeak of ball bearings moving over sand. And sure, it sounds great to be able to open your whole house up to the outside, but think about whether in your area, bugs, flies, mosquitoes or dust is going to make this a good idea.

Well, if anybody ever gives you all those dollars, you can buy one of these self-unlocking timers for your bathroom door. What’s more, if somebody stays in the bathroom over their allotted time, the door doesn’t just unlock to reveal them in all their leg-waxy, hair-dyeish, toenail clipping glory, but it also calls an emergency phone number! If you have a regular offender for late bathroom exits, why not make it their boss?

You need to program the time limit in the initial setup, and from that point onwards it can’t be changed, or so we understand. Ner, nerny ner ner! However, there is a button on the back of the door lock to cancel the alarm. It must be pressed within thirty seconds of the alarm going off, to stop the call being initiated.

The technically advanced door lock is really designed to help elderly people, who often slip and fall in the bathrooms, and due to brittle broken bones or resulting injuries can’t get up. However, we can see much wider applications … obviously . Although the irony has been noted, that if an elderly person needs to jump quickly out of the bath to cancel a shrieking alarm with only a thirty second window, that the risk of injuries may very well be increased …

We would also recommend, for bathroom hog thwarting (now doesn’t that sound like a fun weekend sport?! Bathroom hog-thwarting …) that the timer be re-programmable … but perhaps with a pin code, to stop them simply re-programming it once they have gained entry to the hallowed white halls.

You just need to hope that your Dad doesn’t take to shaving his underarms with the door open, now!

Via Yanko Design

This door looks like it leads to Santa’s workshop, in the middle of Edinburgh! Wouldn’t you just feel like you were coming home to a dungeon every night, if it weren’t for the colourful door to this dwelling? Painting the panels different colors can work extremely well, and while this example might be a bit gaudy for the taste of people over about 5 years old, there is also a myriad of possibilities with variations of a single colour (olive green, sea green and green-brown, for example), ore you could use more neutral, shaded, primary colours.

Of course, unless you plan to knock out some walls and build onto the outside of your house, you’ll have to build the bookshelf to cover an existing door. That’s what we’ve posted the instructions for, anyway! This is why most people use closets, storage areas or crawl spaces - you don’t have the hassle of moving an entire bookshelf every time you want to enter a frequently used room. Although once they see it in action, your kids will be begging to have one as their bedroom doors … and soon you will have more bookcases than it is humanly possible to use! You also could quite easily modify this design so that a cupboard is used instead of a bookcase.

Also regarding location of the bookcase door, you need to choose whether you will have a single, lone bookshelf that pivots, sitting in front of the door, or whether you will have a bank of shelves covering most of the wall, as the movies tend to do. Having a single book case in front of the door is much easier to build, as there are no calculations for clearances etc. Making the pivoting bookcase part of a bank of cases is much more effective, and much more hidden. It depends what you want out of it, really … isn’t that generous of us, to give you all that free rein!

In our example project, it cost US$350 (£230) to build this - however that could come up a bit, depending on how much of the work you need to outsource, like welding and cutting wood.

To start, you’ll have to put your Maths hat on, and get your old geometry book out. You may want to work as a team, because I often find those skilled at maths are not necessarily skilled at screwing things together!

• Make a scale drawing of your door, and any surrounding shelves. Grid paper is great for this, there’s less measuring to do. Once you have marked all of the outside measurements of the bookcases as well as the door’s measurements,
• You may want to cut out a different piece of paper, scaled to represent the moving part of your book case. This allows you to test various pivot points, to see where the shelf will rub at a given size, using a drawing pin as a pivot point on the paper. Just cut pieces off to make your bookcase smaller!
• In our example case, the width of the case was 42″, and the pivot point was set 7″ in from the right hand side, and 2″ in from the front. The non-centred pivot point allows you to make the case wider, without having to worry about extra clearance room.

Building the Frame
• If you want the bookshelf to be full of real books, or anything else, hinging it to one of the existing shelves in a bank is not going to do the trick. It will need to be strong, and steel framing is a great way to ensure this. Use square hollow steel - around 1.5″ square is a good, manageable size.
• Calculate the size for your frame, leaving 2 inches of clearance at the floor and at the ceiling (for the 1.5″ steel anchors), and the clearance that you have calculated was necessary at the sides.
• You will need to either weld yourself, or have welded in, two x ¾ inch thick and 4″ long bolts to use as the pivot pins. The bolt heads will sit inside the hollow steel frame, while the body sticks out.
• The bolts should be welded at distance that in from the side of the shelf that you calculated for your pivot point. In the example, the pivot point was 7″ in from the side, so the bolts were welded 7″ in from the side of the frame.

Finishing the Frame
• To prevent back and forth rocking, you can attach a short piece of scrap steel perpendicular to the frame you’ve created, rather than building two separate parallel frames and joining them together. This should be around 6″ long.
• Insert a brass ¾ bearing into the 1″ holes of the pivot points at both ceiling and floor.
• You need to make, or have made, 2 anchor boxes to install in your ceiling and floor anchors. In the example these were made of steel, 2″x2″, and had 1″ holes cut in them to receive the ¾” brass bearings.
• The ceiling anchor will be a piece of square hollow steel, the same as used for the frame.
• You’ll also need a washer between the brass bushing and the bolt.
• You’ll need to make a stopper that hits the steel frame, to prevent your bookcase from bashing into your wall constantly. Nice way to break down your house! Make a wooden stopper to mount to the wall at the upper end, long enough to reach the steel before the bookcase door reaches your wall … crash!

Building the wooden bookcase
• You’ll need to build the bookcase inside the frame, rather than tacking to the front of it, to have the benefit of the steel’s strength.
• The frame will sit around 2/3 of the way from the back of the bookcase.
• Measure how deep, tall and wide you need the bookcase to be. Cut your wood with a circular saw (or have it cut for you), and start sticking it together the best way you know how! For more pointers on building the actual bookcase, check out these detailed instructions.
• While you have got your hammer and nails out, you will need to create some trim to hide the steel frame, on both sides of the bookcase. You can use a thinner, cheaper wood to create this trim. It will need to be wide enough to cover the steel framing, as well as the clearance that has been allowed for your particular width of shelf.
• Attach the trim on the pivoting side of the door to the bookshelves beside your bookcase door, and attach the trim on the opening side to the door itself. If you have chosen to make a single pivoting bookcase, and leave the surrounding area open, you’ll need to make some thin, tall boxes to completely surround the steel framing.
• You’ll need to bevel the trim on the pivoting side of the door to allow clearance for opening and closing.
• There will also be trim on the top and bottom of the swinging bookcase door, to cover the floor and ceiling anchor steel.

Paint, decorate, fill and then hide!

We’ve spoken a lot about the energy and symbolism of doors. Your front door is the gateway to a hidden world, for all those that have never been inside your house… why not make it seem fun, mysterious, ethereal, crazy, or just a bit different to every other boring door (and therefore house) out there? That feeling of excitement and energy should last once people are safely within your walls, also …. Mwa hah hah haaaaaaa…! Also a good way to deter travelling  salespeople and religious propagandists, with the right decorations

We’ve been in the process of re-doing the website for some time now - with the explosion of new and different suppliers we’ve had, the old product search methods we had were getting a bit unwieldy. However, the same popularity which made it unwieldy also made it quite tricky to redevelop. So while you won’t care, we’re immensely excited about its delayed arrival! If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t go off and explore straight away. We’ll just give you a rundown first, so you don’t fall in any poison ivy or walk into a bear’s nest or a griffin’s den, or anything .

Where previously you used to search for products by telling us what sort of door furniture you wanted (knob, lever handle, door bell, coat hook etc), and then getting all the results lumped together, now you can search by style first, and type second.

This refines the results you get immensely, so you can do less skipping through pages of door knobs and knockers that won’t suit your home, and more choosing between the greater of two goods! (As opposed to the lesser of two evils, that is).

If you liked the old way, don’t moan just yet - you can still search like that, using the ‘View All Products Range’ on the right.

Once you’re initiated into the ways of the doorhandle (its an exclusive and refined club!), you may find favourite manufacturers. You can see their entire ranges easily, by clicking on the drop down box at the left of screen and selecting their name.

Once you’re in your search results, another critical difference is the ability to sort your results by model. Where products that looked mostly the same would previously only show together if they had the same first couple of words in the title, now they’ve had grouping tags added to make it easier to find products that coordinate for your home.

And one, tiny change that most of you won’t notice - we know have a second language, Russian! The land of ice and vodka represents a great customer base, and we’re happy to be able to spread the warmth of brass and copper to a land where warmth can be hard to come by.

Now run off and play! If you can’t find anything, just drop us a line - we’re happy to answer directly.

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 it, at any rate! These doors have to be made to withstand the pressure differential between the cabin and the outside atmosphere at 18,000 feet, remember.

Of course, once you have the same door that is protecting Barack Obama, you’ll need to have some of his car’s other security features for your home, also. The windows are tough enough to withstand armour piercing bullets, and none of them open - apart from the driver’s window, which can flip open at the front to pay tolls. What a lovely, down to earth, law-abiding president that pays tolls! There is an oxygen supply included, as well as a firefighting system. There is a Panic button installed right next to the president’s seat, and if you are the worryin’ sort, one of those probably won’t go astray next to your bed either! Obama’s seat also has a direct line to the Pentagon and the vie-president of the US. You might find it a bit more difficult to get one of them.

Or, rather than installing 757 doors on your home and armour-plated windows, just move to a quieter neighbourhood!

Via Gizmodo