Hammer & Hand’s master jointer is in high demand for historically-accurate & modern custom window & door fabrication.
Fine craft is Hammer & Hand’s raison d’etre. As carpenters and woodworkers we’re passionate about the tactile, the well made, and the beautiful. It’s about both the integrity of the made object as well as the integrity of the process of making – precise work performed by craftspeople who’ve undergone rigorous apprenticeship and training in their trade.
We’ve written a good deal here about how this ethos plays out in the field at the sites of our remodels and new construction. But it’s equally at work here, on the first floor of our headquarters in Hammer & Hand’s woodshop led by master jointer Dan Palmer.
Dan and woodworker Josh Tinker build everything from custom vanities to upcycled furniture in the shop, but a big portion of their work is the creation of custom doors and windows. Clients and designers seek us out both for our ability to create museum-quality replicas of historic windows and doors and for our capacity to execute clean, modern lines with the precision demanded by no-room-for-error designs.
I spoke recently with Dan, who’s been Hammer & Hand’s go-to woodworker for eight years, about his efforts building custom windows and doors for the company’s clients and design collaborators. Below are two examples of this work, one for an historic Portland home, another for a Vancouver modern home.
Windows Become Doors
Ever since purchasing their 1936 Colonial-style home in Southwest Portland, our clients hoped to create a better inside/outside connection from their living room space. They approached Hammer & Hand to convert two existing windows into a pair of architecturally-consistent French doors:
To match the trim profiles exactly for both interior and exterior door casings, Dan had custom knives created for his shaper. Then he set to work in the shop:
With doors built, Dan reframed and flashed the openings, hung the custom doors, and trimmed them out with the custom-fabricated casings. The result is a graceful new connection between the home’s living space and new patio that looks like it’s always been there as part of the house:
To create a more thorough barrier to weather extremes, Dan created two storm doors that matched the architectural details of the French doors within (deftly, I might add):
Home, Sweet Home
The owners of our eco-modern Vancouver Airport Home, designed by Scott Edwards Architecture, have lived on the site for 40 years, and wanted to bring something from the old, preexisting home into the new. Dan incorporated stain glass salvaged from the deconstructed home into two entry doors of the new house, built from clean, simple vertical grain Douglas fir doors:
More cool windows and doors vignettes to follow soon!
– Zack
