Heroes & Half Doors
By Dina - October 8th, 2010
The other day, my creative director and I were sketching ideas around Speck’s new branding initiatives. One thing lead to another and we got to waxing poetic about half doors. Well, Tark did. But I couldn’t help but appreciate the delightful puzzle it presented: where do half-doors come from? who invented that?
World Wide Web to the rescue!
First a definition (a la wikipedia): A Dutch door (American English) or stable door (British English) or half door (Hiberno English) is a door divided horizontally in such a fashion that the bottom half may remain shut while the top half opens.
And now, a story. This one’s from Frank Fullard, a flickr gentile: In the 1690s English monarch William III was short of money, which he attempted to rectify by the introduction of a Window Tax. As the name suggests, this was a tax levied on the windows of a property. The upper classes, having the largest houses, paid the most. Some wealthy individuals used their ability to pay as a mark of status and demonstrated their wealth by ostentatiously building homes with many windows.
However, people generally went to great pains to avoid paying the tax and many windows were bricked up for that very reason.
Irish cottagers developed their own unique and innovative approach to avoid paying the tax by inventing the half-door. It was possible to leave the bottom half closed, thus keeping children in and chickens and other animals out; while leaving the top half open thus maximizing the amount of light coming in. Because the light coming through was from a door, rather than a window, they avoided paying the tax, and in the process became daylight robbers!
And there you have it. Thanks for joining us folks!
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