To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.
Rules · Doors & windows · Ornament · Proportion
The doors of the rooms and their dressings
Make the doors of the rooms of panelled joinery, six panels to a leaf in the Georgian house; set an architrave a sixth of the opening wide round each, eared at the head in the Palladian manner; and over the doors of the best rooms set a frieze and cornice, or a pediment, as the room’s rank allows.
Palladio makes the architrave round a door or window a sixth of the opening’s breadth, and the frieze and cornice over it in proportion; Gibbs and the English pattern books that followed drew the doorcases of rooms the same way, with ears at the head of the architrave and, in the best rooms, a pediment.
Each face of a door is dressed as the room it faces: an opening between the hall and a bedroom passage may have a pediment on one side and a plain architrave on the other. The leaves here stand open into the room, hung on the side nearer its corner. The heights of the overdoors and the pitch of their pediments are editorial.
Related rules
Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
Proportion every step so that twice its height plus its depth equals the length of a natural pace on the level: two feet, or 24 pouces.
2 r + g = 24 pouces ≈ 65 cm (modern practice: 60–66 cm)
Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Over a long row of windows on the principal floor, set triangular and segmental pediments in turn, so that the row is read in pairs and does not run on monotonously.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The doors of the rooms and their dressings”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/doors-within. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.