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.
