There’s a particular kind of door that stops you in your tracks.
Not because it’s perfect, but because it isn’t. The paint worn down to bare wood at the edges. The handle smoothed by a thousand hands before yours.
This one is on an Orthodox church in Helsinki and I almost walked past it. When I finally pushed it open I had no idea what was waiting on the other side. A jewelbox of an interior, gold icons glowing in the dim light, the kind of hush that lands on you like a hand on your shoulder.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. How we almost miss things because they don’t announce themselves.
On another day, I spotted a storefront with an open door. Dark inside, impossible to tell what it was. A small hand-painted sign read Art’s and Craft’s, apostrophes cheerfully in the wrong place, and I found myself smiling.
Something about that small grammatical rebellion made it feel more human, more inviting, not less. I wanted to go in precisely because it was a little quirky, a little different, a little unexpected.
We have this habit, especially in North America, of covering things up the moment they start showing their age. Remember those aluminum screen doors from the sixties, bolted right over perfectly beautiful wooden doors? There’s a whole philosophy in that impulse. New is safe. Familiar is safe. Different is suspect.
And that’s worth pausing on. Because the fear of the unfamiliar, the impulse to replace or avoid or cover up anything that doesn’t conform, that’s not really about doors at all, is it.
Wabi-sabi knows better. The worn edge, the faded paint, the asymmetry, these aren’t flaws. They’re evidence that something has been here, has been used, has mattered.
Old things have layers. Old things have depth. Sometimes the most surprising openings come through the oldest doors, and the darkest ones.
And that goes from literal or metaphorical.
Sometimes something very new does come out of something old, like the opening of a restaurant from a beautiful old neo classical building.
All original images are my portals and thresholds series.
Very interesting