The Year in Short

Believe it or not, at Architectural Classics we haven’t just been sitting around, surfing the web looking for cool antique door furniture and cats that can open doors. We have actually been quite busy! Yes Mum, I promise that’s why I haven’t called…

Over 2007 we have:

Spent time at the Spring Home and Garden Show in Dublin, where the most popular items this years were our light switches. Plenty of people were enthralled with the Bakelite range, the jelly-mould range, and the ceramic range. Crystal was also a popular material here this year – which is interesting, given that on St Pats Day when Ireland and Italy played rugby, most of the crowd were shouting like punters at the pub and swearing like troopers off-duty! Can you imagine these same people counting out notes for a crystal escutcheon and carefully carrying it home?! A gorgeous sight!!

Newsweek featured one of our Louis XIV style knobs in their magazine: and also acknowledged what we have been saying for ages (come on!), that as your first tactile experience with a room, a door knob is a huge part of the impression you form of a house or room. Nerny ner, told them so!

Everybody knows that Google has the best search facility on the web – and in April we teamed up with them to provide the same facility within our own site. We added a Google toolbar button, so that you can simply type your search term into the Google toolbar search box and click on the little door knob rather than the usual ‘Go’. The only problem then is that all the fun and excitement of browsing is taken away!

We found our own, real-life antique mystery … although we really were more the Watsons of the case than the Sherlock Holmeses! We tried to track down the origin and story of the mystery chandelier from St Donat’s castle, which was previously owned by Mr. Randolph Hearst, and later, Dr Frank Barham. Dr Barham’s daughter Patte approached us to lock the chandelier in a darkened room, subject it to water torture, play a little good cop bad cop and finds out what its story is! Or failing that, to just ask people on the internet…

We also merged the site and sound ;-), so that you can now listen to many of the door bells that we sell on the site before you purchase them. We know how uncertain it can be buying things off the internet, and hope to make it as stress free as possible for you all!

We have now been blogging for nearly a year, and found that even when you are only talking about door knobs, the world is a wide, weird and wonderful place that is full of serendipity, magic, the unusual and the downright cute, and would like to thank you all for reading about what we have to say about it!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody!

Photo credits: Four Seasons by green_lover