If you live in a Perth home built any time in the last few decades, chances are every internal doorway is framed in plain steel. No moulding, no depth, nothing. Just an ugly metal edge painted the same colour as the wall.
Most people assume they’re stuck with it. Adding a proper door architrave to a metal frame sounds like a job that involves demolition, brick dust and a bill you don’t want to think about. It doesn’t have to be. Here’s what’s actually involved, and why the usual advice sends people down the wrong path.
Why Perth homes have metal door frames in the first place
Metal door frames aren’t a design choice. They’re a construction one.
In double brick homes, the frame is set into the brickwork as the walls go up. The bricks are laid around it. That makes the frame structural in a way that timber frames in stud walls simply aren’t, and it’s the reason nobody wants to touch them once the house is finished.
Coming from the UK, we found it genuinely strange. Every doorway back home has a moulded surround. Here, you walk into a beautifully renovated house and the doorways look unfinished. Once you notice it, you really can’t unsee it.
The advice most people get
Ask around and you’ll usually hear three options.
Rip the frame out. This means cutting into the surrounding brickwork, making good afterwards, and re-rendering or re-plastering. It’s messy, expensive, and you’re doing structural work to solve a cosmetic problem.
Fit timber architraves over the top. Better, but timber has to be fixed to steel, which isn’t straightforward, and it swells and splits in wet areas. Fine in a bedroom. Not in a bathroom or laundry. In addition, there can be a lot of difference between the wall and metal frame from top to bottom. Timber isn’t very pliable, so it almost always requires a carpenter to install adding an additional expense.
Live with it. What most people end up doing.
There’s a fourth option, and it’s the one we built specifically to fix this dilemma.
A door frame architrave designed to fit over what you already have
Andy spent a long time drafting a profile that would solve this properly, and after several prototypes, we launched our Easy Frame door frame additions to the Perth market.
The design has a rebated edge to sit on the outside edge of your existing frame. The result is that the addition covers almost the entire metal frame, sitting on top of it rather than replacing it.
Nothing gets ripped out. No brickwork is touched. You keep the frame the builder put in and simply give it the surround it should have had from the start.
They’re made from dense polyurethane, which does a few useful things:
- Fully waterproof, so bathrooms, ensuites and laundries are no problem
- Lightweight and pliable, which makes handling and fitting far easier than timber
- Paintable, so it matches whatever colour scheme you’re working with
Choosing your door architrave design
We make four profiles, and picking between them mostly comes down to how much presence you want the doorway to have.
- AA 01 Milano: Clean and understated. Suits modern and minimalist interiors.
- AA 02 Corona: A bit more shape without being ornate.
- AA 03 Havana: More detail, good for homes leaning traditional.
- AA 04 Vienna: Our most decorative profile, for when you want the doorway to be a feature.
We often get asked if our architraves match skirting designs. This isn’t something we recommend. Instead, we have designed all of them with similar detail to compliment specific skirting types.
A metal architrave upgrade works best when it’s consistent, so most customers pick one profile and run it through the whole house. That said, there’s nothing stopping you using a wider design on the entry and hallway doors and something simpler in the bedrooms.
If you’re also thinking about your ceilings, our cornice additions are designed to sit alongside these. You can read more about pulling the two together in our post on transforming your interior with door architraves.
Doing it yourself
Manufactured in versatile and pliable Polyurethane, we designed them as a DIY product. The rebated edge does most of the hard work, because it locates itself on the existing frame instead of leaving you to eyeball the alignment.
We’ve put together a full step by step installation video that walks through the whole doorway. If you get stuck partway through, phone and email support is there, and we’d rather you called us than guessed.
Not everyone wants to spend a Saturday on it, and that’s fine, and for those, we install as well.
What if the door butts up against a wall?
Comes up more often than you’d think, particularly in hallways and compact spaces.
Our door frame additions are designed for three sides of a doorway, but they work perfectly well on two.
What it costs
A standard doorway starts from $105 + GST, whichever design you choose. Installation is charged separately if you’d like us to handle it.
Put that against removing frames and making good the brickwork, and the gap is enormous. It’s one of the few upgrades where the visual difference is out of all proportion to what you spend, which is also why it’s popular with people getting a house ready to sell.
A door architrave isn’t the thing anyone puts at the top of the renovation list. But doorways are the one feature that repeats in every single room, and when they all look unfinished, the whole house reads that way.
Fix them and people notice. They usually can’t tell you why.
Get in touch for a free, no obligation quote, or browse our four door frame designs to see which one suits your home.