Entrances of Houses-How to Design Them

The history of entrances is a tale of humans alternatively wanting company and wanting to be left alone.
The first doorway were openings in caves,the first doors boulders ,bark,&branches,and the hides of animals.Well before the dawn of western civilization ,humans were experimenting with new ways of framing openings and welcoming visitors.A megalithic tomb built in Ireland five hundred years before stonehenge,acess to a one acre burial mound is through a pair of upright stones spanned by simple stone lintel and a roof box- a square opening serving as a primitive transom window. At daybreak during the winter solstice, sunlight enters the box and for fifteen minutes penetrates the passageway, illuminating the center of the the tomb.
By the thirteenth century B.C., Greek temples such as the Lion Gate in Mycenae featured triangular stone carvings over the lintels, and by the fifth century B.C.,important houses and public buildings such as the Parthenon used colonnades,or rows of columns, to connect the outdoors to the interior, and to enclose an entry porch that framed an anteroom and central doorway.
Similar in shape to cave entrances, arched entrances came to characterize and dramatize the way in. Saxon doorways, from A.D. 500 to 1066, had high, rounded arches; the most notable surviving examples are St. Peter and St.Paul churches in Canterbury. By the Romanesque period in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, entrance arches had become brader , more rounded , and ornate. And in the succeeding Gothic period , which ranged across Europe from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, doors were often massive constructions of vertical boards, but entrance ways had taken a distinctive and delicate turn in the form of pointed arches, such as those found at Notre-Dame in Paris.
In America, the English who settled New England brought with them building traditions from the old world,including the Tudor-like batten door: an unframed wooden doors  of usually rough , vertical boards fastened to horizontal or Z-shaped battens- short horizontal strips of wood-on the inside. it wasn't just that the windowless doors were sturdy and easy to make; their main purpose was keeping uninvited callers-beasts of the forest , American Indians, and fanatical neighbors-out.
       
Early Colonials, Saltboxes, and Capes didn't appear much more welcoming. On Massachusetts' Cape Cod, where Capes originated in the late 1600s,unsheltered, unpainted, unornamented doorsways demonstrated a kind of reverse snobbery; the more self-effecing the facade, the more proper the occupants.

By the eighteenth century, however, the door had slammed shut on Puritanism, and the front entrance became an increasingly important part of the American home. Geogians , Federals and Greek Revivals boasted grand entrances with pediments, porticoes, columns , pilasters, sidelights, fanlights, and balconies. The Victorian era added sweeping entry porches and even more moldings and ornamentation.

All these embellishments were popular until the early twentieth century, the advent of the modern movement and , alarmingly, of the attached garage. In the sprawl of suburban development in America in the second half of the last century, the garage door at the end of the driveway usurped the front entrance as the true destination and the primary point of ingress. Some home owners were said to know of no other way into their houses.
Now in the twenty-first century, front entrances are being rediscovered and appreciated.seldom-used front doors are being unstuck ,doorways widened and whole facades re imagined to reclaim that entrance as the true portal into the house.

In general ,entrances are the most sucessful when they

• satisfy the owners taste,needs and dreams;
•  suit and enhance the style of the existing house, in character if not in literal architectural style;
• are propotionate and scaled to the rest of the house;
• draw the eye to the door without overpowering the facade;
• use details and ornaments that support the entrance rarther than proclaim themselves;
• invite guests waiting for someone to answer the door to admire the details and workmanship.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This article is written by -
  Ms.Vinita Mathur
  Interior Design Department
  Dezyne E'cole College
  Ajmer