Shipston-on-Stour Village Traditional Cottage Windows and Doors

Another beautiful Cotswold stone cottage local to us, and another success for our most popular timber window from STM Vinduer in Denmark. Always, we like to encourage our customers to exploit the bespoke nature of what we can provide, and there’re a good number of subtle stylistic choices here that make perfect sense for the setting.

Most notably outside, we have the hinges colour-matched to the frame. Traditionally in Denmark, hinges are galvanised steel and, whilst I personally quite like that, I’ll freely admit they do divide opinion. As a side hung hinge is quite large, blending them into the frame is a popular choice. The choice of having the Light Grey RAL7035 colour on these is our favourite off-white solution.

Every new Danish window and door without exception will arrive with satin chrome or steel handles by default. This makes perfect sense in Scandinavia as that material finish can be viewed as both modern and traditional. Also, it’s hard-wearing and is typically minimalistic as we’d expect: perfect for any Danish customer. Whilst satin chrome can work perfectly well for a UK customer too, we recognise that a UK view of traditional moves more towards either brass or black iron.

Swapping a Danish window handle for something made in the UK is often quite straight forward. But swapping a Danish door handle is honestly quite complicated. You’ll see the lock is a completely different shape and in a different location for a start! Along with other differences, this means we’re normally restricted to made-and-designed-in-Denmark door handles, and a black handle is very rare over there – the trend never had a period in history where it caught on.

Continuing a typically traditional detail: we avoided our normal black sealing tape around the edges of these windows. Whilst the black shadow gap surround can be viewed as timeless, pointing around the windows undeniably suits this home far better. We did of course use our German airtight foam before the pointing took place.

On the base of this door, we have a jatoba timber threshold combined with a colour-matched aluminium box cill. When newbuild properties aim for flush thresholds, this means the the floor level inside and outside is at the same height, and additional drainage will be present on the outside. When we’re replacing a door, the floor level difference is often very large. In this case, our combination of cill and threshold being 77mm tall was important to make sure we didn’t install the base of the door leaves underneath the internal floor – this would not have looked good at all!

On our doors generally, you’ll see that the hinges are not equally spaced – most of the hinges congregate near the top of the frame, finishing with a small guiding receiver right at the corner. This is another trait that you’ll almost always see with Danish doors: ignoring the idea of equal spacing means that the hinges are located where you actually need them for long-term usage. The forces exerted near the top of the door are far more than at the bottom. Typically, you’ll find older UK timber doors are rubbing at the bottom because the equally-spaced hinges were not placed correctly to prevent the door leaves from dropping downwards over time.