Turning the garage into living space meant starting with the door and its scary tendency to fall on your head. The large exterior of that door seemed like a blank canvas, an opportunity to declare what the house, and we, are trying to be about.  Actually, not an opportunity, more like an obligation.
We decided on carriage house doors made of redwood, the wood our house is made of and the wood of this region.  Design inspiration appeared in the form of Hexagram No. 32, “Duration,” our wedding theme, which, like our backyard cedar tree, has grown with us over the years. Searching for a craftsman who could make doors out of our dream, we found Robin Kopit and his company, Extraordinary Doors, right here in Santa Cruz.  Robin was the perfect person to execute the design. He had a supply of old redwood originally from the Bargetto winery, where the timbers had been used to support the aging barrels, and he used that redwood for our door panels. He made the raised bars of the hexagram out of curly maple, and finished by installing a set of doors beyond our wildest imagining.  It’s hard to do them justice in photographs, but these images convey the idea.

                     Doors concept in Sketchup                             Click below for a gallery of images of the finished doors