If interior decorating magazines are anything to go by, there are now a million and one ways of styling unique character into your home. Whether it’s designing your own wallpaper, optical illusions with statement lighting or simply arranging armfuls of sticks around the joint, there’s something for everyone. God forbid we should just have what everyone else is having (although, ironically, that does tend to be the result).
What you never hear much about, though, is custom window and door fittings. There’ll be the odd reference to painting your front door yellow or bird-shaped knockers being out of fashion. And, of course, there are endless tutorials on crafting locally appropriate wreaths for Christmas. But the openings themselves? Virtually nothing.
I will grant that these things are a bit harder to personalise, given that they’re generally built into the house. At the very least, most people will want to accommodate the existing frames, and these don’t often leave much room for interpretation. That said, there are still plenty of scope for original thinking when getting, say, an aluminium front door replacement.
What scope? Well, you could have a custom door made, with a genuinely unique framing configuration that… I don’t know… supports circular panels. It could be a bit complicated; I hear that. But it’s also completely doable. People used to do things like this all the time, back in the day, out of necessity. Maybe not with aluminium, but certainly with timber. Our fixed ideas of what a door ‘should’ be have blinded us to the endless possibilities.
You can even take something quite commonplace, like sash windows. Across Melbourne, these are an everyday sight. There are plenty of things people could do to make them their own, like having non-quadrilateral panes. Hold up, I hear you say. How would that work for a sash window? Well, my friend, that’s for you to go and puzzle out. Open your mind and your sash windows will follow.