A front door is the first thing a visitor touches and the last thing a builder gets to hide. Past about two and a half metres a pivot door stops being joinery and becomes engineering: the leaf can weigh well over a hundred kilograms, and every millimetre of movement shows up as a gap you can read from the street.

We make and hang pivot and feature entry doors in solid timber, veneered core and clad substrates, sized to the opening rather than to a catalogue. Blackbutt, spotted gum, American oak and walnut are the ones we are asked for most, and each one behaves differently once it is in a west facing opening through a Sydney summer.

The hardware is the decision that matters most. A pivot set is a structural fixing, not a hinge, so it has to be specified before the slab is drawn and packed into a floor build up that can carry it. We work off the hardware schedule first and let the door follow, which is the opposite of the order most jobs arrive in.

Load, floor finish and threshold detail all get resolved on paper before anything is cut. Where a door lands on stone or over a heated slab, the closer and the drop seal have to suit that build up, and the flooring trade needs the setout well before they lay.

Weather is the other half of the job. An entry door that looks perfect at handover and swells shut in February was never detailed properly. We allow for movement in the rebate, seal all six faces before the door leaves the bench, and set the gaps for the season it is being hung in.

Sidelights, highlights and flush pulls are part of the same setout. A three metre door beside a sidelight either reads as one composition or as two pieces of timber standing near each other, and the difference is a single reveal line carried through both.

Finishing is done to the specification: oiled, stained, clear coated, or delivered primed for the painter. An oiled door needs a maintenance conversation at handover, and we would rather have that conversation than be called back in two years.

If you have plans, or even a photo of the opening and a rough size, that is enough to start. We will tell you what is achievable, what the hardware will cost, and what needs to be ready on site before we arrive.