The Story of The Peninsula Wood Entry Door

One of our flagship wood entry door designs is the Peninsula. In the three years since we launched it, it’s become a best-seller and stands as an emblem of our design philosophy. This is the story of how it came to be.

A Modern Front Door For an Idea House

The Peninsula door originally was the result of a request from a client who wanted a unique take on a modern door design. Says Don Rees, our CEO and founder:

“We were working with This Old House on their series Idea House: Mountain Modern. The homeowners, as the name of the show would indicate wanted something modern. It was this house built into a mountainside in Colorado. And so when it came time to design something, I was thinking of how human faces are always asymmetrical. Even the most beautiful people in the world, one eyebrow sits higher, you know. I have more hair on my beard on my left side...we don’t notice that day to day, but if you look closely, you see it. I like that. And I think that total symmetry is boring." (Don is very allergic to doing things the expected way when it comes to design.)

The first ever Peninsula Door, as seen in the Mountain Modern Idea House.

The asymmetry was just one key component of the design, but the other unusual thing about it is how wide the door panels are. This was also deliberate on Don’s part when he designed it.

“Part of the reason I like to use different widths and asymmetry,” Don says, "is because it shows that something has been designed on purpose. Symmetry doesn’t always portend that sense of purpose because it’s what’s standard and expected. We can do standard and expected, but I made my name by going out of my way to avoid that."

"So the Peninsula door is not meant to fit in with the common dimensions of lumber or house framing that we see day to day, you know, two-by-four or two-by-six. Its panels are much wider. As soon as you see a design like the Peninsula, you know it was done with a purpose, meant to stand apart...which is what turns a door from being purely functional to something that feels more significant. And a front door to an ‘idea house’ had better be significant, you know? But now it’s one of our most popular doors and I think it’s because people can feel the purpose and intention behind it, and they want that for their own homes.”

The Peninsula door was named after the Olympic Peninsula, where RealCraft is based. It’s a landscape of dramatic contrasts that encompasses the Olympic mountain range, thick evergreen forests, and serene alpine lakes. The west coast of the Peninsula is rugged, even treacherous, and seemingly always shrouded in mist.

As the resident creative copywriter at RealCraft, I (Amber) name each door design. Whenever I can, I want the name to reference a design feature. Our door design evoked those contrasts to me when I compared the single vertical leg to the stacked set of horizontal planks. The vertical element reminded me of the trees and mountains climbing high in the sky; the horizontal element of rivers, lakes, and ocean waves. The Peninsula is where these opposite energies meet and harmonize with each other.

Adapting The Peninsula to a Pivot Entry Door

This design naturally lends itself to a pivot hinge as well as standard entry. This is because pivot doors are usually more modern or contemporary, and because they tend to be wider proportionally than entry doors. So the Peninsula was one of our first pivot door designs. It also presented us with an unexpected design challenge.

That’s because the pivot hardware that we use has to be set into the door at the proper depth to support its weight.The wider the door, the deeper the pivot has to be set in. And when it came to putting a pivot in this design, with the ultra-wide vertical leg, we faced some challenges with standard tools. We reached out to our pivot hardware manufacturer and found a solution; one specialized piece of equipment was all we needed to adapt the pivot installation to the design.

The Process: Building the Peninsula Solid Wood Door

You might not expect it from how it looks, but this door design is still crafted with traditional mortise and tenon joinery. Because of how wide the panels are, one of the things this design requires is lamination. You probably associate lamination with inferior products like plywood, but we “laminate” pieces of solid wood together when we need to.

If you’re not familiar with the lumber industry, you may not know that wood comes in specific dimensions. Sometimes a wood species only comes in certain thicknesses or widths that don’t match the dimensions of the finished design. More sought-after or scarce woods, like exotic imported woods, typically come in limited sizes. So we glue the pieces together, while always doing our best to match the grain pattern as seamlessly as possible.

Today, the Peninsula design is reflected across our entire product line. It's available as a modern entry door, a pivot door, a Dutch door, and as carriage garage doors.