I’ve long dreamed of crittal doors in our house, but it’s never been a reality before. With hindsight, when we renovated our house in West Didsbury, we should have investigated these metal doors more thoroughly, because as much as we loved our hardwood French doors, I think crittal may have actually been less expensive. However, we went with the wood, and the bespoke design and they were lovely, but I just couldn’t get the black metal beauties out of my mind…

So, fast forward ten years, and we’ve sold up in West Didsbury – and Istria – and are now renovating in southern Andalucia, and this time, I’m not compromising on the crittal doors. They were a no-brainer from the moment we offered on the house, and we knew exactly where they would go.

The house originally had a number of small rooms on the ground floor. Some were just spaces though, with no real purpose apart from walking through them to reach another room. With a potentially beautiful internal courtyard – although definitely not beautiful when we bought the house – we knew we had to open up this floor and create a much more open living space. By doing this, we could potentially have two sides of the internal courtyard to play with, and if we were very brave and knocked out the main wall, we could have our crittal doors. Our builders came and assessed things, and yes, it could all be done – although with the caveat that there would be much demolition and much, much mess before we saw anything which might resemble the new structure of our ground floor, but they showed a photo of a project they had recently completed.

As these doors looked pretty much perfect, we gave them the go-ahead, thinking to ourselves, how bad could actually be? Well, bad, actually. This bad…

Even before the wall to the courtyard had been knocked out, there had been a fair bit of demolition. In between the two windows had been a dividing wall – one room was a small dining room and the other was one of those “spaces” that hadn’t seemed to function anything more than a way to access what was a downstairs bathroom. But once this dividing wall came down, it gave us an idea of how big these crittal doors would need to be, and at one point, for a very brief moment, we did wonder if we should keep the windows. This thought didn’t last too long though, as we knew that was our chance to create a house exactly as we really wanted, with few compromises. So, the big demolition started.

Although we were lucky and were renting elsewhere while this work was going on, we felt increasingly disheartened every time we visited, as it just seemed to get worse and there seemed to be less progress than the last time we’d seen it. The house – if you could call it that – was just filling up with concrete bags, concrete mixers, scaffolding, steel beams, bricks. And rainwater. Because when it rained, we were exposed to the elements. All we could do was keep the vision of what could be, in our heads.

We weren’t just doing the big wall, though, we were also changing the door from the kitchen into the courtyard and the kitchen window, and so the whole ground floor was essentially a building site. (There are two living rooms to the front of the house and these were also being worked on, so chaos reigned for quite some time).

But, without us even realising it, things did start to improve and soon progress was more obvious, with each visit. The steel beams were installed, walls were starting to be plastered, cabling was installed and plumbing points were in place. And, the floor tiles were laid. We could definitely the shape of the house emerging – and that is a very good feeling, mid-renovation!

And then the really big day – the day the builder sent us a photo. The crittal doors and windows had been delivered and were standing in our house! The beautiful custom made windows were here! And yes, that is also the beginnings of a micro-cement kitchen.

And finally, the installation started.

We could not be happier with the choice we made and the time it took from making the decision to installation has been forgotten. We have our beautiful, chunky, metal doors and windows and they have really surpassed our expectations. We’ve only just now started to close the doors in the evenings – it’s November – so for most of the year, we think they will be open, making the house even more spacious. They fold back on themselves and look utterly gorgeous, especially they now allow the internal courtyard to be a real part of the house. The kitchen window is fabulous and the door we replaced, just finishes off the whole picture. The ground floor flows so well and makes absolute sense, now that it is largely open plan, and now that there are no dark spaces and redundant rooms.

Our doors were made by a local firm of metal workers, and were made to our specific design. Everything about them is utterly perfect. They enhance the house so much and bring the outside in, a way much better than we hoped. I am so glad we held fast onto our dream as I now could not imagine anything else would have worked as well. They are a huge part of our house and a huge part of our design decisions, which will last for years to come.