Doors

Door in Tomar, notice the Templar Cross on the knockers.

I have a passion for moldings. On our summer trip to Portugal, that passion grew to encompass doors. In going through photographs from our trip, I found that I took more architectural shots than I did of my own children.

A building’s entrance is its first impression on the exterior world. It is what fuses public and private spaces and can speak wonders as to what is to come. In public spaces the front door is often tall, wide and grand to welcome many visitors at once. In private homes in the United States, the front door varies widely with regional and time-period specific architecture from farmhouse simple with half divided light, to six paneled wood in the traditional east coast, to dual glass doors intricately carved and shaped in city brownstones, to tall and flat in modern architecture.

In our time spent in Portugal, where buildings are ancient compared to what we are used to back home, I found myself so intrigued with the beauty and detail of doors across the small country. Old, new, faded, grated, glassed, shiny, carved, grand—there are too many adjectives to describe the uniqueness of each. So share in our journey across the country in my gallery of entrances: