Have you ever considered a vintage look for your garage door? No doubt, decorative hardware can bring some embellishment to your garage door for added authenticity, personality, and charm. Thanks to our selection of garage door accessories, you can easily and affordably give your garage door some classic flair with a timeless makeover.
What is decorative hardware?
Our decorative hardware captures the rich nostalgia of a bygone era. Decorative hardware refers to ornamental garage door accessories such as handles, knockers, and studs. Both wood and steel garage doors can accommodate decorative hardware. Screw-in pieces are available for wood garage doors and magnetic pieces for steel garage doors.
How decorative hardware can enhance your garage door’s aesthetic
Decorative hardware can be used to give your garage door a timeless look. The pieces have an antique-like quality, as they’re the same type of hardware that was used on the doors of porte-cochères and carriage houses prior to electrification. Of course, at that time there was nothing ornamental about these handles, knockers, brackets, and other hardware pieces. Although they were beautiful and ornate, they were also completely functional.
Decorative hardware also hearkens back to the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished in North America from 1880 to 1920 and whose influence is still widely felt today. The Arts and Crafts movement favoured simple forms in design and architecture and drew heavily on medieval, romantic, and folk styles of decoration.
Today, these items are suffused with nostalgia. They recall bygone eras and give a distinctive personality and charm to one’s garage door.
Decorative hardware options available to Creative Door customers
Many of the Wayne Dalton and Richards-Wilcox garage doors we carry at Creative Door offer a wide array of decorative hardware options. Most Wayne Dalton hardware is made of a black-powder-coated steel with a hand-hammered-look, whereas the hardware on the Richards-Wilcox Carriage House Doors is cast iron made to look like hand-forged wrought iron. Clearly, these styles of hardware and Carriage House Doors go together like—well, a horse and carriage. But these accents—even just a set of door pulls—can lend a traditional touch to our standard Classic Steel and Designer Fiberglass doors.
There are a variety of elegant pieces to choose from when you purchase a Wayne Dalton or Richards-Wilcox door that accommodates decorative hardware. When designing your perfect garage door, you can opt for hardware styles including Arrow, Spade, Spear, Colonial, Aspen, Conifer, Barcelona, Fleur-de-Lys, and more. To see how each style will look on your home, visit our virtual Design Centre where you can try on the various styles and play around with the configurations until you’ve got the right look.
Here’s a rundown of the possible options for dressing up your doors with decorative hardware:
- Hinges extend inward horizontally from the outer sides of the garage door and are positioned at the top or bottom or near the panel section breaks. They tend to be large, prominent and especially impactful in influencing the look of your garage door.
- Lift handles attach to the bottom-centre of your garage door. Note that the handle isn’t meant to be functional, as opposed to the handle that may be installed on the inside of your door for manual operation in case of a power outage or malfunction.
- Pull handles attach to the middle-centre of your door and are quintessential to the carriage house look. Most feature a curved handle, but L-handles are also available. The latter are solid decorative bars with handles protruding to the side that have a more vintage feel.
- Door knockers are the most overtly decorative element of the bunch . and create a vintage appeal. Knockers like the Lion’s Head and Fleur-de-Lys models offered by Richards-Wilcox are exquisitely ornate.
- Door studs are small tacks that look like decorative nail heads, similar to the tacks used for upholstery. They can be placed strategically or arranged in any pattern. The Richards-Wilcox Carriage House Series features rustic square-shaped door studs.
- Corner brackets, or angle brackets, consist of two spears joined at a right-angle or a slightly wider angle. They attach to the corners of your garage door and give added definition.
- Window Accents bring another layer of ornamentation. Whether it’s an old-world wrought-iron motif on the oversized windows of a Grandview garage door, or a gold or pewter round-bar insert pattern on the windows of a Classic Steel door, window dressings can be the perfect complement to decorative hardware.
And, the customization options don’t end there. Not only can you select which decorative hardware pieces you want, you can also choose from a variety of styles. For example, on Wayne Dalton garage doors, there are seven different styles for your hinges, brackets, lift handles, and other hardware pieces: four vintage styles (fleur-de-lis, Barcelona, spear, and arrow) and three modern styles (aspen, conifer, and bean).
To see how each style will look on your garage door, use our virtual design centre. This tool lets you see how different hardware pieces appear on your garage door and allows you to play around with configurations until you’ve got the right look. Of course, if designing garage doors isn’t for you, the experienced team at Creative Door is here to help you determine which pieces and arrangements of decorative hardware are best suited to your garage and home.
Ready to enhance the look of your garage door?
If you want to add decorative hardware to your new or existing Wayne Dalton or Richards-Wilcox garage door, contact the team at Creative Door, or request a free quote from one of our eight locations across Western Canada in Vancouver, Kelowna, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, and Winnipeg.