Cottage and ledged doors
A cottage door is built from vertical boards held together by horizontal ledges across the back, sometimes with diagonal braces. There are no panels and no mouldings. It is the correct door for a cottage, a barn conversion or an outbuilding, where a moulded panel door reads as far too formal.
Cottage doors are the one style where the wrong choice is obvious to everybody. Put a four-panel door in a low-ceilinged stone cottage and it looks like a suburban semi moved in. Put a boarded door in and the room settles.
They are also solid timber, which brings a set of behaviours that engineered doors were invented to avoid. Knowing that up front is the difference between character and a complaint.
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Ledged, braced, framed — the terms mean different doors
Braces run upwards from the hinge side towards the closing side. Fitted the other way round they do nothing useful, which is a mistake made often enough on site to be worth saying out loud.
- Ledged and boarded: vertical boards with horizontal ledges across the back. The simplest form, and the lightest.
- Ledged and braced: the same, with diagonal braces between the ledges to resist the door dropping on its hinge side.
- Framed, ledged and braced: boards set inside a proper frame, so the door has stiles and a top rail. The heaviest and the most stable.
Living with timber movement
Solid oak takes up and gives off moisture with the seasons. A door that fits perfectly in February can bind in August, so allow a slightly more generous gap at the top and the closing edge than you would on an engineered door.
Colour variation, small knots and grain that shifts across the width are what solid timber looks like. Sealing all six surfaces evenly, including the top and bottom edges, is what keeps the movement even.
Hanging and ironmongery
Boarded doors are usually hung on tee hinges or heavy butt hinges, and finished with a thumb latch or a suffolk latch rather than a modern lever. The ironmongery is doing as much of the work as the door here: a cottage door with a chrome lever on it stops being a cottage door.
They are heavy. Check that the existing frame and its fixings can carry the weight before you take the old door off.