The average person might not give much thought to their front door. In their daily lives, they might not even use their front door — they only open it when someone is visiting. The reality of the matter is that you don’t often see your front door, much less devote time to thinking about it.
However, your luxury front door isn’t intended for you. It’s there for everyone else. What it looks like — the color, the size, the shape — is all meant for other people to look at. The front door is an important aspect in the overall facade of your home.
What Your Front Door Says About You
As our favorite architect will tell you, it’s actually not about the door. It runs much deeper than that. Since long before history was well-documented, front doors have been a way to demonstrate wealth and status. In this case, the larger the door, the more wealth, importance, or power the homeowner wants to exhibit. This is true for luxury homes as well as places of business. Think about the government buildings in your hometown — they probably have tall double doors at the main entrance. The same goes for churches, courthouses, libraries, and every other official building you can imagine. To be fair, the larger opening is likely also fire code for public spaces, but no one mandated that the doors have to be quite so tall, elaborate, or grand. 
The front door is one of the first impressions you’ll make as the owner of your home, and luxury homes are not exempt. If anything, luxury homes are more scrutinized than middle-class homes. After all — you’ve got the means for bespoke items. When people visit your luxury home for the first time, the front door is how they’ll enter. Sure, they’ll see the house itself in all its glory, but this is how you’re welcoming people into your home. When you open that gorgeous custom door (which we of course recommend a pivot door), you want your guests to be completely amazed. You want them to stop and ask you questions about that door, because they’ve never seen anything like it.
Color
Believe it or not, the color of your front door plays a major role in the facade of your luxury home. People are always talking about curb appeal, and from that standpoint, even putting a fresh coat of paint on a regular door can increase its perceived value. With luxury homes, the front door is easily overlooked by homeowners. When your spacious, one-of-a-kind home is on the water, facing a cliff, or nestled in between picturesque mountains, the view tends to steal the spotlight — and rightfully so. It’s one of the major reasons you bought that home, or chose to build it there. But again, when people enter your home, they’re doing it through your front door. Color evokes emotion. This is why interior designers take time to create color palettes for the entire home and specific rooms. Bedrooms are often done in muted colors, frequently with blues, greys, and greens because they’re calming. And that’s exactly what you want in a space where you need to calm your busy mind and rest for a few hours. 
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the color of your luxury front door can make a very distinct impression for your guests.
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- White is an extraordinarily common front door color — it may be the most common. So if you’re going for something to set your luxury home apart, this isn’t the direction you want to go. However, white is a very clean color. When people see a white door, they expect to enter a clean home.
- Purple is a very sophisticated color and is therefore often associated with royalty. If your front door is purple, you’re giving the impression that your home will be luxurious inside. Of course, you’re aiming for elegance here, not Mardi Gras. Going too bold can border on garish.
- Blue is often used in tranquil environments — like bedrooms, as we already discussed. Used on your front door, blue hues can evoke a sense of trustworthiness, which may give guests the impression that they can relax in your home.
- Green is another color often associated with calming environments. However, it’s also linked to wealth. If you’re looking for a pop of color on your door, but you want it to remain effortlessly elegant, a tranquil green could be your best bet. Fun fact: at one point green was the most popular door color in England.
- Yellow is an incredibly cheery color. It evokes thoughts of summer, sunshine, and warmth. If you love bold colors and you’re hoping to create a warm vibe throughout your luxury home, this isn’t a bad place to start.
- Orange can be tricky because it’s such a bold color. It’s easy to veer into tacky territory instead of elegant design. If you’re going this route, think Hermès orange, which is already associated with luxury and class.
- Red is typically associated with vibrance and high energy. Being the bold color that it is, it can show your guests that you’re the kind of person who gets a lot done in a day. They probably expect your home to be full of excitement, and also impeccable.
- Black is both bold and classic. On a front door, it sets a serious and formal tone for your luxury home. Of course, if you don’t want to make things too intense, you can break it up with accents.
Size
Whether we’re talking about the front entrance to a large building or a luxury home, size matters. Your home is already opulent, luxurious, and spacious — you can’t have a regular sized front door. It would look so out of place it would almost be comical (that is, if the poor design and lack of forethought weren’t so embarrassing).You simply cannot have a standard sized front door on a luxury home. It needs to be large — whether that means in height or in width, but preferably, both. For many, the obvious answer is double doors. Hinge doors have a limit in width (37 inches) because of the weight limit on the hinge. Switching to double doors allows the opening to be twice as wide (up to 74 inches), and given their larger size, they’re automatically considered more grandiose than a single door. Of course, none of this accounts for the height. Hinge doors (either double or single) that are the full 37 inches wide can be up to about 7.5 feet tall — a height that definitely gives an impression of distinction and importance. If you’re willing to narrow the opening, the door could be taller, because it’s a weight issue on the hinge. But if you don’t want to make any compromises, you don’t have to. Pivot doors are the solution to this situation. Because pivot doors don’t have hinges (they literally just pivot at a designated point), they aren’t restricted to a specific size limit. To date, the largest pivot door we’ve made is 8 feet wide and 13 feet tall. Pivot doors are redefining luxury front doors. You’re no longer inhibited by size limitations and you have the added bonus of blowing people’s minds when your door doesn’t open from one side. Having a door with an offset pivot will give your home an opulence your guests simply won’t see coming.
Custom Luxury Front Doors Hand-Crafted in Italy
We make our custom luxury front doors in Italy at a factory staffed with skilled artisans who have been doing bespoke work their entire lives. You see, there is no such thing as a “standard” door size in countries as old and storied as Italy. So when we ask them to do things like make an 8 foot wide, 13 foot tall door that ends up weighing 1,500 pounds, they don’t balk at it — they simply tell us what we need to do to create a design they can bring to fruition.To that end, trust that we can create anything you want in a front door. When we say custom, we mean it. Size, color, finishes, accents, handles — you name it, we can do it. Here are some of the ways you can customize your luxury front door.
Essential Coverings
Essential coverings are our most basic of options. All of these finishes are smooth panels that can be used on any interior surface (i.e. an interior door, or the interior side of an exterior door). The laminate or lacquered panels can be made any color you’d like, including color-matched to a specific Pantone® hue, or made into a patterned wood veneer. They can be matched with any color palette and every design aesthetic.Essential coverings are minimalist and clean. If that description speaks to your personality and the design aesthetic of your luxury home, these may be good choices for the interior side of your door.
Enhanced Coverings
A step above our essential coverings, enhanced coverings include materials like wood composite and anodized aluminum. Anodization is a special treatment that makes metal impervious, which helps preserve the metal and protect it from wear and tear, corrosion, and severe weather. Anodized aluminum can be painted any color you’d like.Our wood composite can be done in many different shades, including dark or light okume, pine, fir, oak and mahogany. We can match basically any existing wood or composite in your luxury home. Both of these coverings are suitable for exterior use, provided that they’re covered (i.e. a portico, an awning, porch, etc). Either of these finishes would create a stunning luxury front door.Enhanced finishes are at least required for the exterior side of the door. Regardless, they tell your guests that you spent time really thinking about what the door would look like. Furthermore, both the anodized aluminum and wood composite are elegant, yet durable, which tells people that you’re sophisticated, but also practical.
Elegant Coverings
Elegant finishes elevate your home’s facade to new levels of luxury. Whether it’s Italian gres, solid wood, decorative glass, or any combination of those materials, your front door will be a showstopper in and of itself. If you’ve never encountered Italian gres before, it’s a porcelain stoneware that is incredibly durable, resistant to scratches and abrasions, and nonporous. It’s also very easy to take care of, in that it requires almost no maintenance. And of course, it’s made in Italy, so it’s also gorgeous. All of these coverings are suitable for indoor or outdoor use, and can be used in any fashion you’d like. Like every other finish we offer, we’ll make sure it blends seamlessly with your home’s design aesthetic.Elegant coverings tell people that you took pleasure in designing your luxury front door. Guests are sure to stop and ask questions about it — and when they do, you can tell them all about the materials, the design, and why you chose them.
Extravagant Coverings
The top of the line extravagant coverings we offer are intended to turn your luxury front door into a stunning work of art. This is the time to let your imagination run wild — think of the most grandiose ways to decorate a home, and this is where the extravagant line comes in. We can cover your luxury front door with precious stones, such as marble, onyx, agate, obsidian and even Swarovski® crystal orhand-stitched Italian leather (on the interior side only — obviously leather isn’t waterproof).
While it’s unlikely that someone would want to cover their entire front door in Swarovski® crystals (though, stranger things have happened), many people choose to use precious stones as accents on their doors. The same goes for leather, Italian gres, and glass (because plain glass is pretty boring by itself). Something to keep in mind about glass accents is that they don’t have to be boring. They can be dyed a color, be clear, or frosted, and can cover up to 65 percent of the door. Extravagant finishes tell people that you don’t mind showing off a bit. You have specific tastes, and you’re willing to go for it. These coverings are definitely not for people who like to lay low or be understated.
Creating a Luxury Front Door that Leaves an Impression
We want to help you design a luxury front door that gives the impression you’re aiming for. Do you want your home to feel extravagant and stately through and through? Or do you want to keep things simple? Whatever you want, we can make it happen — all with a Platinum Level Service guarantee. Give us a call today to learn more about how we can create custom luxury front doors that will blow your guests away. You can also check out our common questions page to see if there are any answers you’re looking for there. And if you’re in the area, we’d love for you to make an appointment to check out our showroom. We look forward to hearing from you!
