Sunday, October 25, 2009

The Chinese Pavilion has these most excellent doors

Okay, the doors on the other end of the Pavilion are just regular painted (badly) steel doors with a Yale lock, but these doors....even if there weren't any trees or any gardens, they'd be worth a trip. They're heavy wood with sold bronze door pulls. They're not symmetrical; the meeting edges are bevelled in parallel so that you must open the right one first. The locking mechanism is the large board with the carved handle that fits into a slot in the top of the jamb and the slot in the paving that you can just see below the point where the two doors meet. I always feel as though I ought to be robed to operate them. It's kind of fun.

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