The Details No. 6: The Front Door

Every guest meets the same four things before they meet anything else: a sign, a handle, a plate and a button. Most buildings treat the front door as a security problem. We treated it as the first room.

In short: the fanlight above our door carries the building’s name in the typeface from the Doors’ Morrison Hotel, hand-lettered in gold leaf. Below it, the door is fitted in brass — kick plate, pulls and intercom — where the usual Maltese answer is aluminium. None of it is decoration for its own sake; all of it is about what you touch and see in the first ten seconds of arriving.

The fanlight

A Maltese townhouse door is usually crowned by a fanlight — a half-moon of glass in the arch that lights the hall when the door is shut, traditionally filled with wrought iron radiating like the ribs of a fan. The townhouse post explains the type.

Ours is the one place on the façade where we broke the rule on purpose. Instead of iron curls, it carries the building’s name — MORRISON, in the typeface from the cover of the 1970 album the building is named after, redrawn to sit in the curve of a Maltese arch. Behind the letters, where the iron would radiate, are venetian blinds, a nod to the hotel window on that cover.

It was lettered by hand, in real gold leaf, by a specialist in Victorian gilded signwriting — the same protected craft that produced the old shopfront signs of Valletta. The idea is from 1970 and from California. The method is Maltese and a good deal older. It still does a fanlight’s job, too: every afternoon it lights the entrance hall and its newly made patterned tiles.

The brass

The door itself is the oldest thing on the front: about a hundred years old, and still sound, so we kept it. What we changed was the way in. There used to be two steps up to it; we took one away and, instead of moving the door, extended it downwards to meet the new threshold. The same door is now a step taller than it was, and a good deal easier to walk through with a suitcase or a pair of tired legs — accessibility added without losing the original.

Below it, everything you touch is brass. A kick plate across the bottom of the door, where boots and suitcases strike it, because brass takes a knock and wears into a shine where painted timber simply chips. Pulls rather than knockers — the old fish knockers belong to doors answered from inside, and ours are opened by the people who live behind them.

The intercom

This is where most restorations quietly give up. The standard answer in Malta is a flat aluminium panel, the same cookie-cutter unit on a thousand doorways, screwed onto stone that took a century to weather. We fitted a brass one instead, with rounded edges and a little ornament — the kind of plate that looks as if it was always meant to be there, and that will darken and warm over the years like the rest of the brass in the building.

Why the threshold matters

Nobody lists a door pull in a review. But a building announces at the threshold whether it was finished carefully or quickly, and a guest reads that before they have seen a single room. We would rather the answer be obvious from the pavement — and then, once you are through it, we are usually there to say hello.

It is the same argument as everything else here: not luxury, just decisions made by someone who cared how they would feel to use.

Frequently asked questions

What is a fanlight on a Maltese townhouse?

The half-round window set into the arch above a townhouse front door. It lights the hallway and stair of a narrow, deep house when the door is shut, and is traditionally filled with wrought iron radiating from the centre like the ribs of a fan.

What does the sign above Morrison Court's door say?

MORRISON, in the typeface from the cover of the Doors' 1970 album Morrison Hotel, hand-lettered in gold leaf in the fanlight above the door, with venetian blinds behind it in place of the usual wrought iron.

Why use brass for door fittings?

Brass takes knocks without chipping, wears into a soft shine where it is handled, and darkens and warms with age rather than looking tired. On a period building it also matches what would originally have been fitted.

Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in a reimagined 1920s townhouse in Gzira. The door is on Triq San Albert. morrisoncourt.com.