Carved wooden doors

The main door is the one piece of joinery in a house that everybody touches and everybody photographs, which is why the Kerala tradition spends so much on it - the deep-relief panels behind the padippura, the heavy stiles, the brass, the motifs repeated down the panel. Most of what people ask us for sits somewhere between that and a plain modern door: they want the weight and the carving without the whole vocabulary of a tharavadu entrance.

So the door is drawn rather than picked. We measure the opening, ask what the house is like, and set out the panel divisions and the carving at real size before anything is cut. The relief is machined so that a repeated motif is genuinely repeated - the same depth and the same margin down the whole panel, which is exactly what hand carving struggles to hold - and then the undercuts, the edges and the faces are worked by hand at the bench, because a door that is only machined reads as machined the moment you stand close to it.

The same workshop makes the pooja and prayer room doors, the internal panelled doors and the church and sacristy doors. We work teak and rosewood for carved doors, and plywood, MDF or HDHMR where a door is internal and being painted. If you want a timber we do not normally hold, say so at the start and we will tell you honestly whether we can get it and what it does to the price.