Alluminio Elivia Horizontal Wood Grain 4HS - Oak - Swing

You read it here first: this interior door model, part of the Elivia collection, was inspired by the bouzouki, a legendary four-string musical instrument imported into Greece by immigrants from the Anatolian region around the year 1900. It was then further perfected by Greek craftsmen, following which it made it all the way to Ireland sixty years later. Somehow, the Irish found it delightful.

It produces sounds resembling those of the traditional mandolin, only finer and more pronounced, and the playing technique is somewhat different.

Wait a minute, you might say. Wasn’t this interior door collection, the Elivia family, inspired by Elizabethan romanticism?

Yes. It would be silly of us to deny it.

That said, each individual model has an additional source (or two) of inspiration. In this case, should you ask the designers, they’ll tell you it was the spirit of the entire history of music, from Roman Anatolia with their major diatonic scale to contemporary Irish tunes. Pretty neat, wouldn’t you say? The instrument – just like this interior door – is quintessence of harmony and elegance.

Oh, and did we mention this? It does come with all the usual Almese interior door amenities, such as the state-of-the-art hardware, including the 3D-adjustable concealed hinges, magnetic locks, automatic sweep, etc., and a dozen highly attractive finishes for you to choose from. It is also warp-resistant and scratch-resistant.

Why horizontal, though? Well, I thought you’d never ask!

Horizontal in this case means the direction, or, to be more precise, longitudinal orientation, of the wood grain.  

Think of the two standard printing paper orientations, portrait and landscape. Indeed, most portraits (and I mean portraits painted – in oil, on canvas – by  experienced artists) … Where was I? Ah, yes: most of them are vertical, whilst the vast majority of landscapes (painted by honest artists, etc), from Old Masters to Impressionists and beyond, tend to be horizontal. Most, not all. But still …

The reason for this is that each honest artist seeks to convey the impression of vastness first and foremost, as if asking the viewer to look to their right, then to their left, and then to their right again, and imagine all that great space continuing past the frame.

Likewise, as it is with this particular interior door model, the horizontal orientation of the wood grain will create for the viewer an impression of superior width of the room in which it (the door, that is) installed. It is a simple and innocent enough concept that nonetheless can greatly improve your decor by adding visual space to it. You can’t have too much visual space.

The space-creating trick was known to the ancient Greek architects, who perfected it. They referred to it as “optical correction.” Indeed, no proper Greek temple, theatre, or palace was constructed without resorting to it. Next time you’re in Athens, take a long good look at the Parthenon. Note that the columns are tilted inward and the bottom of the façade slopes from the center to the sides: all this so that the structure would appear perfectly geometrical to the viewer positioned a hundred yards from the entrance.

This bold interior door finish – the color more than the grain – is reminiscent of the color of the clipper: the swiftest sail ship ever constructed. Built for speed at the expense of the carrying capacity, those ships traversed both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from, roughly, the time of the American Revolution and up to the second half of the Nineteenth Century, when they began to be phased out gradually by steamships (some of which actually specialized in passenger travel, featuring actual cabins with actual interior doors), and finally fell into disuse after the opening of the Suez Canal.

(By the way. Lauded as one of our civilization’s grand achievements, the Canal, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, is arguably the longest industrial project in history to date. Ancient Egyptian engineers submitted design after design to the Pharaohs, who stubbornly rejected them, shutting the interior door of the palace’s great hall in their faces, even though such a canal would greatly benefit their proto-empire. Greeks talked about the possibility of constructing something navigable in that area for centuries, as Greeks do. The Romans conducted a few dozen feasibility studies – again, over the centuries – but were, somehow, distracted by other important matters every time, such as, to pick a matter at random, selecting the right type of interior doors for a politically adroit senator’s new palace. Finally, fifteen centuries later, give or take, a group of French industrialists saw the project through, and congratulated themselves by commissioning and staging, in Cairo, an opera on Egyptian themes (titled Aida) by Guiseppe Verdi, an Italian composer. Remember this next time you visit it. It’s quite a sight).

Anyway …

A clipper could cross over from Boston to Liverpool in less than two weeks, an unprecedented feat in those days. Apart from the cargo, two or more passenger cabins (featuring interior doors) would be made available to those passengers who did not mind being tossed and thrown off their hammocks and against walls when the outside conditions got serious – or were truly in a hurry.

Previously, sailing a hundred and fifty miles a day was viewed as a very good day’s run. The best clippers could travel more than four hundred miles a day.

It would typically carry extra sails, such as skysails and moonrakers on the masts and studdingsails on booms extending out from the hull. In inclement weather conditions, when the winds were too powerful and the waves too high, other ships would shorten sail and take it easy for fear of capsizing, while clippers just tore implacably on, heeling so much that their lee rails were in the water. Its masts could reach as high as a twenty-story building.

The journey was hardly ever comfortable, but invariably swift. The White Cloud, a so-called “extreme ship,” set the world’s sailing record for the fastest passage between New York and San Francisco (via Cape Horn, of course: the Panama Canal did not exist yet … what is it with our civilization’s reluctance to build canals whenever needed? … ), completing the journey in 89 days. The record stood for over a century and was only broken in 1989.

A number of clippers were used in the British-American War of 1812. Some of them were lightly armed and ready to confront the ferocious enemy, but most were used to deliver urgent messages.

The term was first applied to topsail schooners developed in the Chesapeake Bay even before the battles of Lexington and Concord. Many of those were used, unfortunately, in the Indian and Chinese opium trade, and were later joined by ones built in Great Britain.

The so called “Great Tea Race” took place in 1866, when four ships, named the Fiery Cross, the Ariel, the Taeping, and the Serica, took off from China, carrying tea to London. The race took more than three months as the ships crossed the South China Sea, barreled undaunted through the Sunda Strait of Indonesia, and on across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope of Africa, and up the Atlantic to the English Channel. The three leaders docked in London within minutes of each other.

This interior door finish is a daring one.