Alluminio Elivia Horizontal Wood Grain 2VS2 - Rose Beech - Swing

This highly elegant and only slightly mysterious interior door model is a full-fledged member of the Elivia interior door family. Buying it would be a good move on the customer’s part once the following is considered:

It comes in all standard sizes and configurations, plus, as is the case with pretty much all Almese interior doors, custom options are most certainly available.

It was built using the latest engineering breakthroughs in interior door technology. More on that later.

It comes with our state-of-the-art, ultra-modern hardware, including (but not limited to) the Italian-made 3D-adjustable, self-lubricating concealed hinges (which, apart from their aesthetic value, make the installation ten times easier and faster), soundless magnetic lock, and automatic sweep.

It is warp-resistant.

It has excellent (way above industry standards) sound-proofing and thermal insulation qualities. The former is an invaluable feature where privacy is important – or if you just want to have a bit of a quiet time. The latter will favorably affect your electric bill.

As for what inspired the designers to create this particular interior door model:

First off, horizontal means the direction of the wood grain (or, to use a technical term, the latitudinal orientation thereof), no more and no less. If one of your goals is to impart additional visual space to your interior design (as in, make the room appear wider), this interior door is for you.

Visual tricks have been used by designers and architects since time immemorial. Specifically, ancient Greeks may or may not have invented “optical correction” (as they humorously referred to it), but they certainly turned it into an art in and of itself. Roman engineers, less romantic and more practical, were nonetheless just as fond of it. There isn’t a structure in the world dating back to antiquity that does not bear traces of this. Folks realized very early on that in architecture, perception is everything. That is why, if you look closely at the Parthenon (to pick a structure at random), you will see that each column is wider at the bottom than at the top; that all those columns are tilted inward; that the base of the facade slopes down from the center on either side; and that all of the temple’s geometry seems to be slightly off – all this in order to achieve perfect visual symmetry. For, lo and behold, it does appear quite symmetrical – and quite light – from a distance.

The two vertical stripes spaced closely together (2VS2) are elegant-looking – and a bit of a mystery. The designers are somewhat reluctant to reveal what, exactly, they’re supposed to symbolize, but we can guess. The two towers of Notre Dame in Paris? The majestic supports of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge linking Brooklyn (or, more precisely, Long Island, with its glacial history of the kame and terminal moraines formed by the advance and retreat of two ice sheets so long ago) to Staten Island? (By the way, if the latter is true, the notion isn’t altogether accurate: those two massive gates are vertical, all right, yet not quite parallel: because of the bridge’s great size, they’re sufficiently far apart to be tilted outward from each other – in keeping with the Earth’s curvature!)

Let’s move on to the finishes.   

When selecting just the right finish for your interior doors, bear in mind that associations, i.e. images and concepts it will evoke day after day, are highly important in many ways: aesthetic, psychological, technical, and so forth. Yes: after all, they’re not just any interior doors: they’re your interior doors.

Rose, as a color, is named after the most romantic of all perennial flowering plants native to Asia, with smaller numbers once found in Europe, North America, and northwestern Africa. In ancient Greece, it was closely associated with the goddess Aphrodite. French Impressionists Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Pierre-Aguste Renoir painted roses often and with gusto.

It is a bit of a delicious mystery why this flower’s most common color has been so popular since time immemorial – a mystery seemingly impossible to solve. Why, why? Is it because it’s gentle, youthful, full of hope, full of promise? Who knows. It should never be confused with pink. Not when it comes to interior doors, anyway.

You’ll recall that in the moderately well-known William Shakespeare play titled Romeo and Juliet, the heroine, flinging open the balcony door and stepping out, poses a rhetorical question to herself and promptly answers it while looking at the starry sky: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose … by any other word would smell as sweet.” Poetic license, you might say, and anyway, what does she know, she’s only thirteen or fourteen.

In heraldry, rosa is often used both as a charge on a coat of arms and by itself as an heraldic badge, with five symmetrical lobes, five barbs, and a circular seed.

It was at one point the symbol of the English Tudor dynasty, and the ten-petaled Tudor one, found on some interior doors over in “the old country” is associated with merry old England.

… The beech is, of course, a deciduous tree, native to the temperate regions of Europe, Asia, and North America. While the European variety being the one most commonly cultivated, the American version, native to the East Coast (New England and up) and southeast Canada, are more important in this context. You’ll soon see why.

The popularity of the beech as timber increased a thousandfold several centuries ago when folks discovered it became extremely flexible when steamed. The Thonet Brothers became quite famous as masterful Viennese manufacturers of bentwood furniture (but not interior doors: today’s finishing technique, the one we at Almes Doors apply, had not yet been invented).

That said, folks who use beech timber as a matter of course are musical instrument makers.

Here’s why:

Tonewood – timber used by the music industry – consists of two categories. While softwoods (from coniferous trees) are favored for the soundboards that transmit the vibrations of the strings to the ambient air, hardwoods (of which the North American beech is one) are favored for the body or framing element of an instrument.

Guitars come to mind – or any other string instrument, for that matter, since all of them have curves, but, more to the point, the grand piano is absolutely on that list, since, once all the bending and curving is done, the resulting frame of the modern piano is amazingly sturdy.

Sturdy. Stable. Reliable. Dependable. Friendly.