Alluminio Elivia Horizontal Wood Grain 4HS - Rose Beech - 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.

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.