St. Mary’s has stood in Alton since 1895, and its entries show it in the best way. Each one is a pointed sandstone arch on clustered columns with carved foliage capitals, framing a white wood tracery transom filled with leaded stained glass in quatrefoils, trefoils, and roundels. Stone and glass like that can last for centuries. Doors can’t. They’re the one part of a portal that gets pushed, pulled, and weathered every day, so they wear out long before the masonry around them. The church needed new doors across three entries that could hold their own beneath that tracery for the next hundred years.
Project Story
The thinking behind the work
The Starting Point
The Thinking
The transoms stayed. They’re original to the building and irreplaceable in character, so the doors were designed to be the solid, quiet base beneath them. Vertical plank construction is the traditional Gothic church door, and its long lines carry the eye upward into the pointed arch. The decoration went into the hardware, as it does on medieval doors. Large scrolled strap hinges are the oldest form of door ornament in this tradition. Making them in polished brass rather than black iron lets them glow against the oak and pick up the warmth of the sandstone. Building all three pairs identically makes the church’s entries read as one set.
The Execution
Each pair is built from oak in vertical tongue-and-groove planks, stained a warm medium brown that brings out the grain. Each leaf carries two oversized strap hinges in polished brass, at the top and bottom. Each strap is a long spear-tipped bar with sweeping C-scrolls and pointed tips, fastened with rosette-head rivets and reaching more than halfway across the leaf. At the center, a black astragal separates the leaves, and a pair of black Gothic-style iron pulls with ornate backplates sits at the meeting stiles, with a keyed lock above.
The Result
The entries look the way a Gothic church entry should. Warm oak and gleaming brass sit beneath the white tracery and stained glass, all framed by weathered sandstone. The brass straps are big enough to read from the street, and they catch the sun every time the doors swing open for Mass. Most importantly, the new doors look like they belong to the building. They don’t imitate age, and they don’t fight it. They give the stonework and glass a worthy base.
Specification
Unit Size
6'-0" × 8'-0" per pair
Panel Thickness
2¼"
Joinery
Vertical tongue-and-groove plank construction
Glass
No glass in doors; existing leaded stained-glass tracery transoms retained
Finish System
Medium brown stain with a semi-gloss exterior clear topcoat
Hardware
Polished brass scrolled strap hinges (two per leaf); black iron Gothic pulls with ornate backplates; keyed lock
Installed By
Scobis
Common Questions
Why vertical planks instead of a raised-panel design?
Plank doors are the traditional form for Gothic churches, and their long vertical lines echo the upward pull of the pointed arch. Raised panels belong to later classical and colonial styles and would have looked out of period beneath medieval-style tracery. The simple plank surface also gives the brass hinges an uninterrupted field to stand out against.
What’s the role of the large brass strap hinges?
In the medieval tradition, a door’s ironwork was its ornament: long straps spread across the boards to hold them together and show off the smith’s skill. These straps carry that tradition in polished brass at a scale that reads from the street. The leaves themselves hang on heavy-duty hinges at the jamb, so the straps can be shaped purely for beauty.
Why polished brass straps but black iron pulls?
The straps are meant to be seen from a distance, so they’re polished brass to catch the light and pick up the warm tones of the sandstone. The pulls are what people grab every day, so they’re in a dark, forged-look iron that resists showing wear and fingerprints. The contrast also keeps the hardware from reading as one flat set, which keeps the hinges in the spotlight.
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