Palladio Uno Solid - Ivory Gold Patina - Swing

Here’s one very special interior door, the cornerstone of the Palladio collection of traditionally designed interior doors. As it is with all of the Palladio doors, the design was inspired by the great architect Andrea Palladio, the father of the eponymous architecture style. Made of natural wood, elegantly simple, easy on the eyes, and finished with the patina finish of your choice.

All Palladio interior doors are solid core. Here at Almes, this means that the fiberboard inside is made of natural wood fibers. Highly resistant to warping, the material also provides off the chart sound proofing and thermal insulation qualities. The veneer covering is then finished using traditional finishing methods (you pick the color) and gold or silver patina is then applied to the moldings by hand. That’s right: an actual artist applies it with a brush. The final product has a distinct Baroque feeling, which is in keeping with the main idea behind this interior door collection.

… Padua, the birthplace of Andrea Palladio, is a city in Northern Italy, some twenty-five miles west of Venice. It hosts the University of Padua, founded in the Thirteenth Century, where Galileo once lectured on geometry, mechanics, and astronomy while also making significant discoveries in fundamental science (kinematics of motion and astronomy) as well as applied science (strength of materials, the telescope, and some other things).

Straddling the Bacchiglione River whose various branches surrounded the ancient walls like a mote, the city is quite picturesque, with a dense network of arcaded streets opening into large squares, and a large number of bridges. The city is rumored to be the oldest in Northern Italy. Historians claim it once successfully repulsed Spartan, Etruscan, and Gallic invasions, and formed an alliance with the Romans in the Third Century B.C. against common enemies (including, one must hasten to add, Carthage). Even though it was gradually assimilated into the Roman Republic, the denizens of the city had the reputation for bravery and love of independence.

It is often said that Palladio’s works “have been valued for centuries as the quintessence of High Renaissance calm and harmony.”

To be sure, the basic elements of Italian Renaissance structure, including Doric columns, lintels, cornices, loggias, pediments and domes had already been used before Palladio. His contribution was to refine, simplify, and use them in innovative ways.

His style employed a classical repertoire of elements in new ways. Each part of the building has a function, and this function is clearly expressed by its form, particularly the ceremonial floor known as the piano nobile. Even though he specialized in villas and palaces, he insisted on simplifying the forms, as attested by Villa Capra “La Rotonda,” with all those perfectly square facades surrounding the circular dome and interior (something you must see next time you visit there).

Even though inspired by classical Roman architecture, Palladio did not imitate it outright. Rather, he juxtaposed the ideas of antiquity to those of High Renaissance builders, who at that time (he felt) were already paying too much attention to ornamentation and too little to the overall harmony of the project.

When it comes to picking a finish for your Palladio interior door model, you might want to consider how well it would complement, blend into, or improve your decor – naturally. There are, to be sure, other considerations as well.

Ivory is one of the large spectrum of off-white colors with a history that goes back to ancient Egypt, but the first recorded use of the word in English was in the Fourteenth Century, with the ivory trade reaching industrial proportions three hundred years later, when Siberia was incorporated into what would later come to be known as the Russian Empire. It really took off a hundred years later, when the demand for ivory products began to grow exponentially throughout the world. Ornamental boxes, billiard balls, false teeth, dominoes, ivory carvings, fans, and, above all, piano keys were made of mammoth tusks. Wooly mammoth remains were found everywhere in that region, well-preserved in the permafrost, and theories proliferated on that particular animal whose existence ceased suddenly, it would seem, sometime during the Holocene epoch. It is worth noting that even today, centuries later, the mammoth is still, to a large degree, a mystery. They were big, robust animals who roamed freely around the tundra, fearless and, it would seem, peaceful – until one day something just happened. The research on what happened, exactly, is still ongoing.

Be that as it may, the vast majority of piano keys dating back to the Nineteenth Century and earlier – you can see these instruments in most museums, in the section dedicated to the late Baroque period, such as the one in the American section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City – is made of the wooly mammoth tusk. Siberian export, let us hasten to add, may have saved the lives of countless elephants and walruses: no one could compete with the sheer volume of ivory arriving from beyond the Ural Mountains.

Today’s commercially produced ivory is, thankfully, synthetic (including the pigment we use in this interior door finish, of course). The color is wonderful: easy on the eyes, neither too loud nor excessively diffuse; soothing; and blending easily into pretty much any color scheme.

Oh, and did you know? The patination is done by hand. That’s right. Once the finish is ready (as it is with all Almes finishes, it is scratch-resistant and fade-proof), an actual expert craftsman, armed with an assortment of artist brushes, comes to work on the raised moldings. The gold patina, carefully and lovingly applied, gives the finished product character and an air of timelessness, an invaluable asset when it comes to decor changes. Whether your interior design is classic, traditional, or ultra-modern, no matter how many changes you make to it, these interior doors will continue to fit in seamlessly into it: that is one of the great secrets of this interior door collection popularity, as well as a tribute to the great Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, who valued overall harmony above all else. Next time you’re in Northern Italy, you might want to check out some of those palaces and villas.