Wooden Doors
of Bath

Bath is a city of period front doors — Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian — and a great many of them are listed or sit within a conservation area. The guidance for those homes is clear, and it’s how I work anyway: a historic door should be repaired and restored wherever it can be, not replaced.

Restoration usually means taking the door off and laying it flat to see what’s really going on. I strip back generations of paint by hand and with care — never by sandblasting or dipping, both of which spoil old timber and loosen the joints. Then the door is repaired properly: opened joints re-wedged, splits closed, rotten sections spliced out with matching timber. Stained and leaded glass is fragile and often irreplaceable, so I work around it and leave it untouched.

Finally the door is re-hung, its period ironmongery cleaned and refitted, and a sound finish put on to see it through the next stretch of Bath weather. The result should look like a cared-for old door — not a brand-new one. And if a door truly is beyond saving, that’s where a new door made to fit comes in.

The most useful thing I can tell people is that most doors don’t need replacing — they need a repair. Keeping the original door is almost always the better and cheaper answer.

Bath’s houses move. They’re built of stone and lime, and after a century or two nothing is perfectly square, so the same handful of problems come up again and again: doors that stick or bind on a frame that’s gone out of true; doors that have dropped and won’t latch because the hinges or the top joint have worn; draughts and rattles; and rot, which tends to collect at the foot and the lower panels.

Where a door has rotted, I cut back to sound timber and splice in a new, well-seasoned piece to match — but the important part is dealing with the cause first, whether that’s a leaking gutter or a finish that’s let go. A period door can also be quietly draught-proofed without spoiling how it looks or works. It’s the everyday cousin of full restoration — send a photo of what yours is doing and I’ll tell you honestly what it needs.

Sometimes a door really has had its day — rotten beyond a sensible repair, or simply gone where there was none before. When that’s the case I supply and fit new wooden doors: front doors, back doors and internal doors, in the timber the house asks for.

The catch with old houses is that the opening is rarely a standard size and almost never truly square. There are two honest ways round that, and I do both. A good off-the-shelf door can be excellent value and, with work, made to sit properly in a period opening — I once fitted one to a very narrow Victorian doorway that took real fettling to get right. Or, where nothing standard will do, I’ll have a door made to measure, to the right size and pattern.

Plenty of doors want glass, from traditional glazed panels to a double-glazed unit for warmth and quiet. Whatever we fit, it can be set up with proper locks and security from the start, and made to suit the age of the house.

A wooden door can be both beautiful and secure — you don’t have to choose. Most of the security work I do is on doors people love and want to keep, so the whole point is to make them safer without spoiling them.

I fit deadbolts, door chains and limiters, and — where it suits the door — multi-point locking, which bolts the door to its frame in several places at once and makes it far harder to force. Often the cheapest wins are the unglamorous ones: a lock that actually suits the door, longer screws into solid timber, hinge bolts and a strike plate that won’t give way.

Period doors weren’t built around modern locks, so fitting them well takes care — let in cleanly, in the right place, without weakening the door or marking its face. One of the nicest jobs is the returning customer: a door I’ve restored, come back to be made more secure. Keep the door, improve the door.

Doors are my trade, but I’ve worked with wood my whole life, and now and then a job calls for more. When it’s the right project, I’m glad to take on bespoke joinery — one-off pieces made to measure, fitted kitchen and utility joinery, cupboards, shelving and the awkward in-between things no flat-pack will solve.

I once provided bespoke kitchen, utility and other joinery — along with new windows and doors — for an architect’s client over in Bradford on Avon, a bigger piece of work than my usual door-by-door days, and one I was proud of. You can read what the architect said in the reviews below.

It’s just me, so I take this kind of work on selectively: when it fits around the doors and when I’m confident I can do it justice. If I’m not the right person for your project, I’ll say so, and can often point you towards someone who is.

Replacement windows are the work I’m most often asked for alongside doors, and the principle is exactly the same as it is with a door: the new should sit comfortably with the old.

In a period or conservation-area home that usually means timber rather than plastic — sash or casement windows made to match the proportions, the glazing bars and the sightlines of what was there before, so the house keeps its face. And as with doors, if your existing windows are sound but tired, repairing and draught-proofing them is often the better and kinder option than tearing them out.

If you’re weighing up windows for an older Bath home, talk to me about it — there’s usually a way to get the warmth and the quiet you’re after without losing the character.