Hardware For Doors: There are unnumbered varieties, sizes, qualities, and mechanical designs for Hardware for Doors, and the manufacturers' catalogs appear very confusing to those who are not accustomed to this branch of decorative equipment. While a decorator should have a knowledge of the ornamental forms of metalwork that may be required for certain types of doors or furniture, the mechanical design should be checked by a manufacturer's representative or Hardware for Doors dealer. Serious and quite unexpected errors may easily be made in the proper sizes and types of hinges and locks to be used, even under the simplest conditions.
The great majority of rooms today are furnished with the ordinary, commercial stock-pattern types of Hardware for Doors, but in the best decorative work the Hardware for Doors is specially designed and made to order. The latter type is, of course, far more costly and requires more time to produce. A description of the many available types of Hardware for Doors used by decorators would occupy too much space for the purposes of this book. The reader must be referred to the commercial catalogs of Hardware for Doors dealers or to the craftsmen who make special-order Hardware for Doors and metalwork.
Kitchen and cooking appliances such as caldrons, kettles, and skillets; table utensils such as jugs, water pots, drinking cups, tankards, and other flagons,
Among the more fanciful ornamental objects made of brass and copper were lighting fixtures, water jugs, cisterns, perfume bottles, bowls, strange birds, winged dragons, and imaginary animals made during the Middle Ages in Dinant, Flanders. These have been given the name of Dinanderies*
Hardware for Doors. Many decorators give too little thought to the Hardware for Doors used in a room, and yet the selection of practical and ornamental metal-work for the proper mechanical operation of such features as doors, windows, and drawers is of the utmost importance so far as comfort and convenience are concerned. From the decorative standpoint, Hardware for Doors should be given equal consideration with the selection of any of the other smaller accessories.
Most of the Hardware for Doors that was used for period rooms and furniture was of the surface variety, which means that the metalwork was visible and placed on the face of the woodwork. Under such a condition it was important that both the design and workmanship of the metalwork be harmonious with the style of the architecture of the room, and the craftsmen, having pride in their workmanship and ability, produced by hand, Hardware for Doors of great beauty. Much of the modern machine-made Hardware for Doors is of the mortise type, a term referring to the fact that portions of the Hardware for Doors are inserted in specially cut holes or grooves in the wood; while mechanically satisfactory, such pieces do not play an important part in the enrichment of the room.
Although Hardware for Doors must be primarily functional in design, in each historical period it was either silhouetted or surface-ornamented in patterns that harmonized with the architectural and decorative treatment. The wrought iron pieces were given interest by their shape and hammer marks; the thin brass pieces, by repousse ornament (a surface relief pattern produced by hammering the metals either on the front or rear); the heavier brass and bronze pieces, by cast relief ornament additionally finished by hand chiselling and filing, called chasing, which produced sharper edges and undercuts than was possible by the casting process alone. |
