Arched Door Builder
Arched Door builder in Richmond VA can make any door design to your order. Round door building can be confusing so shop drawings will be commissioned from your napkin sketch so you can see how it all fits together.
Round Door Maker using hand joined mortise & tenon
Arc & Round Door millwork design & build
Have your architect confidently draw you a rounded door from a full hobbit circle to a gentle arc and we will build door and frame.
Many of our oversized doors and gates require custom steel or cast iron hinges which we also produce in house. Can you imagine the tolerances for fitting two steel hinges on a thousand pound wooden door or gate?
Those tight tolerances scare away many builders, but we are accustomed to meeting the needs of very demanding projects. Pictured below sits a site tested pre-paint mechanically driven gate measuring approximately 10 feet by ten feet. Gepetto fashioned the steel framing and mechanical attachments as well as the custom brass all weather bushings that
Arched Door Manufacturer
Gepetto Craftsman are ready to take your call for any type of custom door manufacture or production. Each one of our finished pieces are locally made in Richmond VA.
During the Gothic period, builders found that pointed arches could make structures with amazing power and stability. The architectural designer builders experimented with changing steepness the arch had presented the solution that pointed arches pushed out less than spherical arches. Italian designer and engineer Mario Salvadori (1907–1997 ). “the important difference between Romanesque and Gothic arches rests in the sharp structure of the latter, which, besides presenting the new artistic concept, has the significant result of reducing the arch thrusts by as much as fifty percent.”
Arched wood doors may take almost any kind of room to the next level of creative space. Whether the designing architect uses the arch in the window or the door we have built great results in a half moon light above a rectangular door as well as a half circle light built into the door matching the arc of the top. Wood arch patterns are referred to in architectural styles from ‘free arch’ – means it follows no mathematical center to ‘true arch’ – meaning 180-degree half round with center at the same as the horizontal plane. Dig into architectural history and you’ll find Gothic arches, Tudor arches, oval arches, and throne arch styles. Think large doors for larger openings and a skilled architect will want to split the arch bridge at center of the two doors creating a lovely split opening. Get funky and modern and you can split the arch unevenly creating all sort of fabrication challenges for us in the shop. Don’t worry, we like variety and will solve all of the joinery in our shop-drawings that you will have the chance to approve before we plane out the planks in the species needed.
Arched Door Builder from historic Virginia
The arches used in Romanesque architecture are nearly always semicircular, for openings such as doors and windows, for vaults and for arcades. Wide doorways are usually surmounted by a semi-circular arch, except where a door with a lintel is set into a large arched recess and surmounted by a semi-circular “lunette” with decorative carving. the Romans also used a curved arch to create an illusion of symmetry. We have designed media rooms with a Romanesque feel that uses solid wood paneling to achieve modern amenities like a ginormous 4k media screen with neo-classical fit and finish in line with the exterior elements of the stately Virginia homes in the Fan of Richmond. The semi-circular doors sometimes have a central jamb to support the load or provide extra security. We offer molding productions services to further fit and finish the residential or commercial space with unique and timeless wood craftsmanship.
Whether you want inspiration for planning arched doors into your Virginia home we are one of the few shops in Virginia able to build designer arched doors from scratch. Houzz has 80,000 pictures from decorators and architects all across the country. Look pictures of historic arched doors to inspire your architectural design for a church, school, or club. Contact the Pros at Gepetto who make great architectural mill-work happen and see what kind of great pricing you can get for your groundbreaking idea, or curbside appeal grabbing door design. Explore what’s out there in your city, and make a statement with your front door.
In an interesting historic note on the artch, throughout Maya sites, you’ll come across gateways and doorways that look somewhat like an arch, but which are structurally quite different. You are witnessing a corbelled vault! Builders of at least some Maya sites were familiar with a true arch (they were used here and there, largely in underground construction), yet corbelled vaults were used in the majority of cases, despite their drawbacks. A corbel vault’s construction set’s it apart by offsetting successive courses of stone at the spring line of the walls so that they project towards the archway’s center from each supporting side, until the courses meet at the apex of the archway (often capped with flat stones). For a corbelled vault covering the techniques is extended in three dimensions along the lengths of two opposing walls. The best set of drawings of the diverse range of shapes and sizes of corbel vaults can be found in the Sylvanus Morley book “The Ancient Maya”. A corbel arch (or corbeled / corbelled arch) is an arch-like construction method using a more primitive the stone mason technique of corbeling to span a space or void in a structure, such as an entrance-way.
Corbel arches constructed by offsetting successive courses of stone (or brick) at the springline of the walls so that they project towards the archway’s center from each supporting side. The angle of the arch limited by the size of the material until the courses meet at the apex. Although an improvement in load-bearing efficiency over the post and lintel, corbeled arches are not entirely self-supporting structures, and the corbeled arch is sometimes termed a false arch for it’s mechanical flaws. Unlike “true” arches the structure’s tensile stresses (caused by the weight of the materials) forming the arch are transformed into compressive stresses. Corbel arches and vaults require significantly thickened walls and an abutment of to fill to counteract the effects of gravity, which otherwise would tend to collapse each side of the archway inwards. But as a modern door design, that harkens back to the primitive roots it can be an inspiring shape of a false arch. Arched door builder in Richmond can add a point or other decorative rounding
Within the modern building industry of 2020, door panels without any framing are referred to as “slabs.” Residential entry door slabs are primarily manufactured in wood, insulated steel, and fiberglass. Vinyl entry doors are also available, as are doors produced with other composite materials. Interior doors are most commonly made of wood, but rarely of solid wood. The arched door builder most commonly features a hollow core and a face or skin of veneer. Unfortunately, these doors are only as good as their adhesives – which technically are very cheap. Yes, it’s easier to CNC route an arc into a ‘high grade’ of high density particle board – but if you’re looking for the traditional craftsman who is going to align the grain of a solid plank for solid block mortise and tennon joining – then give us a call for your needs. There’s simply no comparision – nor solid feel – as a door made cleanly from wood who’s cells grew molecular bonds with each other for a few decades.
Aesthetics drive the use of wood for doors and windows in commercial, institutional, and multifamily construction projects. According to the Window & Door Manufacturers Association a trade association representing over 145 U.S. and Canadian manufacturers and suppliers of windows and doors, wood is “highly versatile due to its botanical structure, composition, and properties. As a material, it has high strength in relation to its weight, high heat- and electrical-insulating properties, and desirable acoustical properties.” But that language itself doesn’t convey the aesthetic beauty of a deep thud of your arched wood door we built shutting firmly fitted in its frame. The solid wood aesthetic grows from the roots up as we craft and shape your custom door from a solid plank. We use the most modern of tools to be time and cost efficient in the manufacture of your wood door – but we continue to honor the strength of truth of the grain and species of the lumber you specify for your door.
We are a custom arched wood door and frame manufacturer that refuses to use computer aided machining but specialises in constructing custom strong wood doors that old fashioned way – by hand. Improve the appearance of the interior or exterior of your home, office or restaurant with hand carved entryways made by professional craftsmen and inspired by the past.