When Did Doors Become So Terrible?

A funny thing about renting an old house or apartment—one with lots of nice character that makes it pleasant to live there—is that you, as a tenant, enjoy nice things, hence why you live there. And yet that nice old place is full of absolute garbage—from the bathroom fixtures to the kitchen counter to the included window AC unit—because your landlord does not live there, and they do not actually care about it being a nice place to live; their obligation is strictly to profit. And there's a line that you won’t cross with regards to improvements you might make to your nice old place, because you don’t know how long you’ll be there, and improvements are really just boosting your landlord’s profit, which is not a priority for you.

The "landlord special"—the cheapest, jankiest possible fix to a problem—usually refers to repairs, like a new coat of paint that’s simply laid over a previous coat of paint (and screws, and wall outlets, and window frames). But it’s also an approach to new items, like cabinets, floors, appliances, and perhaps the least appreciated of all, doors. 

The landlord special door is white. It has panels, either one, two, four, or six. It is extremely unsatisfying to use, owing to its extremely light weight, but its perfidy goes far beyond that. This door—which probably saved your landlord, at most, around a hundred bucks—makes your living situation noticeably worse and more expensive. It is a curse. Every time you use it, you should want to put your foot through it. This would, as we’ll learn, be extremely easy to do.

How did we get here?

The door has always been important both practically and symbolically; archaeologists have even found false doors in tombs dating back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom era, more than four thousand years ago, which it’s theorized represent the threshold between life and death. Before the Middle Ages, we have very little documentation about how doors were made, except for those in the homes, churches, and universities of the very rich. Those doors were made of bronze, or iron, or wood dried over decades and bound with sculptural metal. Doors for everyone else were made of plant material which tends to disintegrate, and record-keeping of the lives of the non-rich is usually spotty at best anyway. After that, though, we start to get some data.

James W.P. Campbell and Michael Dutton’s book Doors: History, Repair, and Conservation, which is more interesting than its title suggests, provides some design documentation of non-rich-person, non-artistic doors and how they came to be. "The architect, in the modern sense—as someone who draws and oversees the design, but is not the builder—emerges in this period, first in the fifteenth century in Italy and then in the sixteenth century in France and Spain, and finally throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. Architects were sometimes craftsmen or artists and sometimes gentlemen or scholars," he writes.

 The downfall of the door is a particularly telling example of the destructive effects of capitalism on our quality of life.

 Typically these were ledged doors, made of planks of wood running side by side vertically, with one or more boards joining them by running horizontally. The vertical boards could be joined with a tongue-and-groove or other system, or could just be crammed next to each other, edge to edge.

In the last century before the Industrial Revolution, doors tended to be made of teak or other hardwood for the wealthy, and softwood (like pine) for everyone else. Architects in this era, writes Campbell, were heavily inspired by Vitruvius, a Roman architect whose writings are the only of their type to survive from antiquity. Roman doors had decorative panels; thus, so did Tudor doors. "In the seventeenth century a new type of door—the paneled door–emerges that is economical in material and yet so refined and so beautifully designed that it will become, in all its delicacy, the accepted way of making doors for the next three centuries," writes Campbell.

By the beginning of the 20th century, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, new materials began to creep into doorcraft: plywood by World War I, stainless steel and Masonite in the interwar period, and then, finally, the most cursed of designs, the honeycomb, in the 1930s. Honeycomb doors are hollow; they are constructed of very very thin front and back and sides, with as minimal a structure as possible in the airy middle. Instead of being solid wood, what’s inside these doors is often a few pieces of Styrofoam or some meek cardboard props. They are, mostly, hollow, and were first designed for WWII aircraft as a way to minimize weight. 

Doors and the modern home

The other development in door design was not so much in their material but where they were used. In the US, the number of enclosed rooms grew from the turn of the century through the 1950s, when the one-story ranch and split-level style houses took off. "The kitchen was not considered a public zone," says Kate Wagner, an architectural writer and the creator of McMansion Hell. "You didn’t want to see the labor." Walls, usually accompanied by doors, separated the public spaces (living room, dining room) from private (kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms).

There were good reasons for this, even aside from the sort of holdover Victorian upstairs-downstairs social construct. The kitchen, for example, could get very hot, and could contain many smells and noises. A wall and a good solid door could keep heat, sounds, and odors isolated. Kitchens were also usually located at the rear of the house, so there could be an exterior door for ventilation as well as deliveries of ice, milk, and other supplies, and disposal of garbage, all without being seen (or smelled) by the rest of the house.

 In the interest of saving a measly hundred dollars up front, we are stuck with paper-thin, inefficient, and unsatisfying portals we use every day. 

As mid-century architecture began to break down walls—Wagner chalks up the liberation of the kitchen to TV cooking shows, in part—interior doors became needed really only for bedrooms and bathrooms.

Today there are a couple different kinds of doors. There are solid wood doors, which are, you know, made of wood. There are solid-core doors, which are usually nice hardwood veneers sandwiching some cheaper softwood. Then there are hollow-core doors. Sometimes other materials are used in part or in place of wood: aluminum, steel, glass, or various wood-type products like hardboard and particleboard.

The International Code Council, which creates guidelines that most cities and states adopt at least in part, has some rules for exterior doors. They have to be of certain minimum sizes, and have to be somewhat fire-resistant. For security reasons, most exterior doors, and especially front doors, tend to be with solid wood or solid-core. This is because you can break through a hollow-core door with little more than a stern talking-to, which makes even a thoroughly locked hollow-core door more of a suggestion than a security measure. 

Oh, so my door in my apartment is bad?

But interior doors, even in open-concept designs, have no such rules. You can use a barn door, if it’s 2010 and you've watched a lot of Property Brothers. More commonly, you can do the landlord special: a hollow-core door from Home Depot, which will run you about $60.

These doors are outrageously bad at everything. "For anything to be effective as a sound barrier, it needs to have mass so that the sound energy can either be reflected or absorbed," says Wagner. Sound transmission for doors is measured in STC, or Sound Transmission Class. A standard hollow-core door has an STC of around 20, which means you can clearly hear and understand normal-volume speech through it. A solid-core door usually has a rating of 30, a 50% increase. Solid wood doors, and many solid-core doors with some better dampening systems in them, will score in the 40 to 50 range. 

Hollow-core doors are also very bad at energy isolation. This is usually measured with something called an R value, but essentially, a hollow-core door will leak heat like crazy compared with a more solid door. This means that it’ll cost more to heat and cool your home, because you aren’t able to effectively target the parts of your house where you actually are. You’ll be heating and air conditioning spare bedrooms, bathrooms, basements. 

We may have moved to a more open-plan style, but we still use doors for bedrooms and bathrooms, and we still want those doors to be able to block sound and heat. Otherwise we might as well just use a curtain, right? Or a barn door, which is effectively a dumber-looking curtain.

The downfall of the door is a particularly telling example of the destructive effects of capitalism on our quality of life. In the interest of saving a measly hundred dollars up front, we are stuck with paper-thin, inefficient, and unsatisfying portals we use every day. We spend more on heating and cooling, we hear each other poop, and our teens are forced to endure horribly unsatisfying angry bedroom door slams. These doors suck and we shouldn’t have to use them anymore.

 Top image by Grace Cary/Getty Images

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