Fetishistic Flibberty Jib

Amidst the slings and arrows of the current battlefield that is Balintore Castle (await future blog entries), there are still small day-to-day restoration wins that lift the heart

A couple of original drawing room doors were re-hung in their original positions this week, and today an entire end wall of the drawing room was sheeted with a batch of very thick bargain basement plasterboard that I obtained perhaps 10 years ago. At the very least, explained Gregor, the plasterboard and doors are no longer cluttering up the castle. :-)

You can see original plaster on the right-hand wall in the photo, but on the back (east) wall, the only surviving flat plasterwork was totally shot and no plaster mouldings whatsoever had survived.

By looking at the existing wooden frame for the door in this wall and the positions of the hinges on the doors lying on the ground, Gregor and Gavin concluded that the door facing inwards was flat (not panelled) and had no architrave or surrounding frame.

This seemed jolly unlikely in a principal room, where it is all about show, and no other reticent grand doors like this exist in the castle. The surviving jib doors (i.e. the type that disappear almost undetectably into a wall) at the castle are all ensuite toilet doors in bedrooms.

I then remembered someone had given me a historic photo looking in this direction and I fished it out of my Google Photos store. Et voilà! If you look carefully you can see (or perhaps almost not see) a jib door. 

You can see the very same door in the top photo just to the left of the orange hi-viz jacket. It is almost invisible too.

Gregor and I would have preferred the grander moulded side of the door to be facing into the room rather than hidden in a telephone box sized space between two doors where traditionally servants would stand waiting for orders. However, you cannot argue with the evidence remaining in the building, and now the photograph: we are dedicated to putting things back the way they were.

I will ask some architectural historian contacts whether this is a usual thing. It is certainly very odd to my way of thinking. But it is undeniably an unbalanced door (no matching door on the left) and Georgian architects had a fetish for balancing what could be balanced, and hiding what could not.