Door knobs are a feature of your home that everybody notices, because nearly everybody that comes into your home must touch and utilise them. People will notice their look, and how that works with what is around it, and they will notice their feel … whether they are made of a cold material, whether they are comfortable to open, how fragile they seem, and even how clean they are. Unfortunately, how clean your door knobs are is often something you won’t notice until that rare day when you go around and clean them, and you can feel how bad they must have been beforehand!

Door knobs made recently are usually made from either metal or porcelain, for durability, ease of use, and to be unobtrusive in modern décor. Those same doorknobs look terrible if you have a home filled with ornate furniture, rich woods, carpets, chandeliers and older fabrics! But just because door knobs today are made with durability (and also affordability) at the forefront of people’s minds, does not mean that if you want a doorknob that you don’t have to replace and is easy to use you have to go to your local hardware store. Antique door knobs are one of the items from olden times that are highly prized, and many beautiful ones have been kept.

Unlike in modern-styled homes, your old home can also look great with different door knobs in each room. It’s different; it has character; it is not a mass produced wood and concrete box, which needs uniformity to avoid offending the eye. Which is lucky for you, since many places you will find antique door knobs will not have unlimited stock on demand depending on how many doors you have in your house, and whether you want to match your closets to your walkways!

The materials artisans used to make door knobs of included porcelain and brass, most commonly. You can also get cast-brass door knobs, and especially door knockers, quite easily, and while they are made for a more common material, in striking shape they certainly don’t look common. You may have seen the lion or creature head door knockers already on the front doors of older and display homes. Porcelain door knobs were not just made in beige, white, cream, ivory and off-white – they came with patterns, pictures and designs on them, and you could also find shaped porcelain knobs with edges and bevels on them – if you are lucky enough this patterning with go with the carving on your furniture.

Door knobs also came in leaded crystal, and controlled bubble glass, in a variety of colours. When you are looking at door knobs for your home, use glass door knobs on your interior doors, and probably more in your bedroom and the dining room than in your kids’ rooms. Glass door knobs are also practical on closets and cabinets, and interior French doors. In heavy usage areas they can crack and fracture, as they will if kids treat them mean, or knock into them with toys, or slam the door repeatedly. The other thing to note is that if the door knob fractures through play, your little one might cut themselves – and door knobs are at just about eye level for many kids!

Mineral door knobs were another popular trend decades ago – these are baked clay knobs with a cast iron shank inserted before the knob went into the oven. The clay surface was porous, so would have been very hard to keep clean without a glaze or light slip. You can get mottled knobs, with different coloured clays that were ground before being combined and cast, or streaky knobs, where different colored clays have been stirred together. In their original incarnations, mineral knobs were obviously for the less well-off homes, but now as antiques they can lend class and interest to any room. Mineral knobs were made from earlier than any other knob, owing to the relative ease of creating them – the fact that they could be shaped by hand and finished in the fairly common kiln meant they were used frequently, earlier than other types of material. Porcelain door knobs are sometimes included under this category, as are ivory or ebony knobs. John Paige Pepper actually patented a stone knob in 1851, and Josiah Jones, in 1867, applied for a patent for an improvement to mineral knobs.

If you are looking at collecting antique door knobs more for display than for actual use on your doors, Bennington’s knobs is the name to look for at antique stores and auction houses. These were made at Bennington, Virginia – the Americans made the art of door knob making their own, producing many intricate and beautiful designs during the period that it was fashionable. Christopher Webber Fenton was responsible for making many of these Bennington knobs. He used granite, pottery, marble, and various coloured glazes, and many of his knobs were created in a typical octagonal shape, making them distinctive, and also the victim of many copycat designers!

If you catch the door knob collecting bug, as so many do, why not use your knobs not only on the doors of your house, but also as coat hooks, towel holders in the bathroom or kitchen, and on the cupboards and cabinets of your house? It becomes an addiction for people just entering your home, to walk through to every door and see what sort of knob is on there … on second thoughts, maybe this isn’t a good idea. You will spread the knob-collecting bug to too many people … leaving none for yourself!

Photo credits: I hope i can fix these by Neon Mamacita, A door without a handle is a wall by Ty Siscoe

          

This entry was filed under Door Furniture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.