To hate those new front doors with the big bar?

[iwantfabulous]

Slowly lots of neighbours seem to be replacing their perfectly nice front door with grey ones with a big bar as a handle and a letter box at floor level.

I don’t know why but they make me irrationally annoyed!

🤣🤣🤣 they don’t give me the rage but I do pity the poor posties…

You’ll probably be seeing them all the time after this thread!

There's a house not far from me which came to the market a couple of years ago. I was gutted because we hadn't quite finished our house and I'd been looking at this house for years and dreaming. It was in budget too but simply the wrong time. You could see from the photos that it had retained all original features and from the cornicing to the ceiling roses, stained glass to original mosaic floors, it was as stunning inside as I hoped. I notice as I drove past a few months ago that it had lost its stained glass door, replaced by one of these dark grey, office doors, letterbox at the bottom, slab of glass down one side, bar handle etc, and I winced.

It's just come to market and I looked at the photos with too much hope. They've gutted it. Grey walls, grey carpet, grey velour dining chairs with a big silver handle on the back, grey kitchen, grey bathroom. Original stairs were sweeping with beautiful balusters and they've replaced with weird modern glass. On and on and on. They've just ruined it.

Those doors will forever be the portal to a dystopian nightmare in my mind.

Disclaimer: I know it's just bricks and mortar and a matter of taste.

I didn't know I had an opinion on front doors

That made me laugh, @Wolfparty

What's accessible about a floor-height letterbox?

I detest them. The house opposite has one so I am forced to look at it all the time. Theirs is a semi and in their 'wisdom' they replaced their windows, sofia and guttering with grey. The house they are joined to has white. It looks bloody awful.

They look like pub toilet doors.

A 1930s semi with stained glass windows sounds truly hideous.

They're the dado rails of 2023. I’ve no idea why folk would spend what, £1000k or more or something that will date so quickly. At least with dado rails you could just whip them off and paint the walls.

Yes, hideous. We are also getting a lot of big grey sliding fence gates round here and the ongoing decline of gardens and walls in exchange for massive concrete parking spots

YANBU - especially when coupled with matching grey windows. And they look even more awful on old houses - just so out of place. In the future they'll look as dated as brown 1980s windows do now.

Many many years ago I had a paper round. Two houses on the round had very low level letter boxes.

I cursed those houses - and I was young and bendy!

Each to their own but generally the 1930s houses had timeless design where as the modern featureless boxes are very of their time.

I know what you mean, we viewed a beautiful Victorian house a few years ago and lost out to another buyer. One of the first things they did was remove the traditional wooden door and replace it with one of these, which totally ruined the character of the house imo.

What do you like, out of interest, @noname846, in the window and door department?

I've got a few to replace (1880s terrace) and need inspiration.

Timeless design? I honestly can't think of anything worse than a suburban road full of soulless semi detached houses like those stretching out before me. Just awful.

Not keen, the long handle reminds me of an office door and looks like it should be indoors.

Yes I hate the bars too!!! My mum does as well! We both think they look like public toilet doors!

They look nice enough on public buildings, health centres or shops.

We live in a semi built around 1976. Our neighbours have had this type of door fitted: dark grey, long, vertical, brushed steel handle, long narrow pane of smoked glass. It doesn't suit the style of the house, at all. They've replaced all the white guttering, soffits and downpipes with black. None of it suits the age of the property.

We've just had a new front door (not the fridge/freezer door) and the postie thanked us for not having a floor level letterbox as he said they were a pain for them to use.

The grey door/massive bar handle reminds me of prisons for some reason, so they're a no from me.

But then I'm a traditional red/green/black/yellow door with stained glass person. The more colour the better! 😁

There's a parliamentary bill to ban them but it has been stuck at stage one since 2019. Understandably, it wasn't a priority due to covid and everything that came with it.

DH is a postie and he absolutely hates ground-level letterboxes. As an aside, he also hates those giant bows people wrap around their front doors at Christmas because they cover the letterbox. Some people even decorate the bows with stuff like holly, so his hands get scratched to bits 😒

I don’t mind ours, it replaced a very ugly white flimsy UPVC door on an ugly 30’s house. We’ve done a lot of work on the exterior and interior, we don’t have glass in the door but do have a full length floor to ceiling panel of obscured glass to let light in.
It looks better than the old door and has 4 locks so extra secure. The letterbox is low down, didn’t realise quite what a faux pas that was but given we only get post once a week I don’t really care.
I certainly don’t think it’s unique, we chose it out of a catalogue, it wasn’t custom made! We were the first people up our street to have one and now a couple of others also have similar.

Really bugs me when they've replaced one of these, for one of those bar ones!

I've never understood people who buy a period property and then promptly start ripping out all of the period features. Bonus points if they've ripped out the beautiful garden too and put astro grass down.

Agree!

Public lavvy chic.