Which gates to have?

[Feltwell]

A quick recap....

I've replaced my tatty old garages with a new one, and in the process re-built my badly leaning garden wall and collapsing gate piers for the driveway entrance. The driveway is at an angle to the road, as the old piers were very tight for space getting my car in and out I've built the new piers slightly further apart, so a new gate is required.

This is how it looked before:-

Close up of the old gate (which we believe is only about 10 years old):-

And this is how the entrance looks now:-

And lastly, a general shot of the house - mine is the right hand half with the two-tone paintwork, another job to try and complete this year!:-

The question is, what to replace the old gate with? It needs to be 2 gates rather than 1 large one, and I want to go for metal gates rather than timber. I've no idea what was there when the house was built, there are no clues from neighbouring properties, I'm not in a conservation area nor is the house listed so I can have what I want.

I could just put new gates in, in the style of the old, but I feel I should look at other options first - the old gate was very "square" and plain, lots of straight lines - a curve or 2 wouldn't go amiss! Functionally the gates are there to keep small children and possibly dogs in - so bars close together low down are a priority. Security is not so important, they will be closed at night but not locked.

My and Mrs F's tastes tend to be for the simpler & less ornate - lots of scrolls or fancy Fleur-de-lys finials are not our thing, the budget is limited as well so simpler & cheaper is good!

I quite like the look of this style:-

http://www.peterweldon.co.uk/range/_styleguide/style_1.htm#

This is a very similar design, although for us the gates would have to be lower and double gates rather than a large single:-

Or perhaps this style, although it is rather "busy" - maybe the colour doesn't help:-

Has anyone any other suggestions or examples of style?

 

[jocelyn plummer]

Agree, two gates would be better than one. Has anybody in the area still got their original ironwork for you look at?

 

[Feltwell]

Agree, two gates would be better than one. Has anybody in the area still got their original ironwork for you look at?

Not really. There's a real mixture of housing here, from all era's, but very little in the way of original irownwork. One of the Victorian terrace's further down the road has it's original gate, but it's only a small pedestrian gate and it's for a very small 2up-2down worker's cottage.

It has to be 2 gates for me - the old single gate was too heavy and was pulling the brick pier over. I think aesthetically it would be better as well.

 

[JoceAndChris]

How lovely, what a great sense of satisfaction you must feel! The Peter Weldon gates look beautiful, but expensive. If you're going to go out and just buy a set you'll be limited by what's available, of course- but that's surely the cheaper option than having them made. Archtectural antique sites may provide some interesting examples.

I prefer your first suggestion to your second, which I also find a bit busy.

Here's my 19thC gate, it may or may not predate the Victorians. However, I've seen other gates like this outside Victorian properties in the town, and one example, if you can imagine it, was in the same style but elongated and as a double gate. Very elegant.

 

[Nigel Watts]

I think a pair of oak gates, rather than iron ones, would look better here, perhaps with an upward curving top rail, slats between the middle and top rail and solid tongue & groove panelling between the middle and bottom rail. This would make the front garden look a little more private and enclosed, giving a rather more appropriate feel for a late Victorian suburb I feel.

I like and much approve of your green paint!

 

[jocelyn plummer]

Nigel makes a good point about wooden gates. When I asked if there was any original ironwork in the area I thought that maybe you could get an idea of the detailing. Joce's are interesting, bit earlier than Victorian I think.

 

[Penners]

If you like the original gate (and saving money), here's an idea: take it to a specialist, and get them to make you a small, pedestrian gate to an identical pattern. Then you'd have one large and one small gate, which is not an unusual configuration.

 

[vicky whitworth]

Or a good blacksmith could cut your existing gate in two, add in some extra length on both sides and finish neatly. I like your existing gate's style because it's simple and inoffensive, and it seems a shame to scrape it.

I bought my garden gate for a fiver at the local tip but I then had the opening in the wall sized to fit the gate - not an option for you, I know.

 

[Feltwell]

Thanks everyone for all your thoughts.

The house definitely had double gates originally, as we found evidence of the old hinge pins on the "non-hinge" pier when we re-built it. As to if they were equally sized gates - no idea!

Oak gates would be lovely, but we had a problem with the previous gate pulling the pier over so really want to keep the construction as light as possible. Also, with Coalbrookdale & Ironbridge just down the road, it's highly likely that the original gates were iron - the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron is full of Victorian gates & railings, albeit much grander ones than we want! I know they mass-produced more humble examples, which is quite likely what graced my house.

I know a good blacksmith and did consider getting him to adapt the existing gate. However, after my father sold some quite scruffy timber gates on Ebay recently for £150 - starting price 99p! - I think that with the extra work that would be involved in adapting the existing gate, I'm better off getting new made and selling the existing gate. The existing gate is also not the best quality - it's OK, but up close it is unmistakeably modern. The blacksmith I know is very reasnobly priced and his work is excellent.

Joce, I love that gate - very clean and simple lines. Alas horizontal bars like that are an invitation for kids to climb, and I'm not sure it would work as well with vertical bars on a much wider gate. I shall think some more though! I agree the Peter Weldon gates look expensive - the one I'm looking at is almost certainly his cheapest, you want to see some of the grandiose examples he has elsewhere on his site, gracing the entrances to various stately piles! What surprised me is that they are all made in Vietnam, of all places - the quality looks excellent though. I was just using his site for inspiration and ideas, as part of a general web search.

 

[Feltwell]

Oops, just realised that my link above to the drawing on the Peter Weldon site doesn't take you to the specific gate I was on about. It's the "Agricultural / Farm Style gates" - these ones, but I can't make the image any bigger! Computer's aren't my forte:-

 

[JoceAndChris]

Mm, I'd figured that out from your pic after the link. It's nice. (although personally I wouldn't be able to resist a couple of scrolls- you know what I'm like) If you can get a good blacksmith to do your design it's going to look a million times better than a cheap, mass produced article available in Wickes or some such place. I think your house deserves it!

 

[MdB]

 

[Feltwell]

If you can get a good blacksmith to do your design it's going to look a million times better than a cheap, mass produced article available in Wickes or some such place. I think your house deserves it!

Thank you! I'd rather wait than get an off-the-shelf set of gates, not that I think I'd be able to get them to fit. As a matter of interest I checked the website of a local gate manufacturer to me, who churns out cheap mild steel gates that to me look very flimsy. For a design not hugely different to my old gate, in roughly the right size, they were only about 20% cheaper than the blacksmith quoted.

Is your gate secured to stop it being taken off it's hinges Joce? If not I'd seriously consider doing so, gates are a very common item to be stolen, especially nice old ones! If you've got welding kit then a washer welded onto the hinge pins is an easy way to do it. Otherwise an L shaped bracket above the hinge pins is at least a deterrent.

And thank you Mdb for re-sizing that picture!

 

[JoceAndChris]

For a design not hugely different to my old gate, in roughly the right size, they were only about 20% cheaper than the blacksmith quoted.

Is your area quite cheap to get work done? It's the same here - craftsmen and women quite desperate for projects and often very reasonably priced.

Is your gate secured to stop it being taken off it's hinges Joce? If not I'd seriously consider doing so, gates are a very common item to be stolen, especially nice old ones!

Thanks for your concern, it would break my heart to lose it so I'll look into that. It's not an easy property to rob, fortunately.

 

[Penners]

the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron is full of Victorian gates & railings

Maybe you should consider visiting the museum, wearing a voluminous overcoat.

 

[Nigel Watts]

A final thought. Given the relatively large width of your gate opening I think a pair of identical gates would look better than two mirror image gates such as the example above with the continuous curve going from post to post. If each gate had a comple curve of its own the visual effect would be to break the opening visually into two distinct elements, which would in my opinion be more sympathetic to the scale and period of the street. These images of one of the first garden suburbs (Bedford Park in London) captures something of this I feel:

 

[Feltwell]

Is your area quite cheap to get work done? It's the same here - craftsmen and women quite desperate for projects and often very reasonably priced.

I don't think it's particularly cheap round here. This blacksmith does seem very reasnobly priced, and he's very trustworthy - he's done a couple of jobs for me now where it's been on the basis of "Don't know how long that will take me - I'll tell you when it's done" - and he's never taken the mickey on the final price, always been very fair. I also pay cash and pay & collect promptly, and I don't hassle him on timescale, so it works 2 ways I guess. He sells a lot of stuff on Ebay and tries to stick to a delivery timescale on that, so odd work for others gets fitted around that I think.

the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron is full of Victorian gates & railings

Maybe you should consider visiting the museum, wearing a voluminous overcoat.

:lol: Alternatively, I could sneak up the the museum entrance with a giant cartoon-style magnet........

 

[Feltwell]

A final thought. Given the relatively large width of your gate opening I think a pair of identical gates would look better than two mirror image gates such as the example above with the continuous curve going from post to post. If each gate had a comple curve of its own the visual effect would be to break the opening visually into two distinct elements, which would in my opinion be more sympathetic to the scale and period of the street.

That's an interesting thought, and one that hadn't occured to me - thank you Nigel.

 

[worms]

a pair of identical gates

The gates on the Victorian house where I grew up (I always thought they were original, but on reflection, I can't see how they avoided removal during the war when the railings and all the other gates in the street went, so perhaps they were immediately post-war) had a raised feature on one of the gates, which was slightly wider, giving the impression when closed of two identical gates with a central pillar. The one with the raised bit had a pin to fix it shut, leaving the other as the access gate when the gates were closed. So, not exactly a pair of identical gates but matching gates that give that appearance.

 

[Feltwell]

I wouldn't normally post an update on something as minor as this, but as you nice people helped me to decide what on what I wanted it seemed rude not to.

So, how do you like my iron gates with a curve in them then???

Wooden gates ended up being less than half the price of having metal ones made, plus I realised that wood would look better. The drive is at an angle to the road - metal gates tend to have the hinge eyes mounted on the end of the gate, the angle of the drive and the need to open the right gate beyond 90 degrees and still clear the brick pier meant that I realised that hinges would be best mounted on the back of the gate and mounted "in" a few inches, otherwise you'd have a huge gap between the gate and pier when it was closed. It's a bit hard to describe!

The slightly clumsy nature of this meant the hinges would look much better hidden behind a wooden gate, rather than visible through a more skeletal metal gate. I suspect this was why there was only 1 large gate there before, rather than two.

The gap beneath the gates when closed is larger than I would like, but the drive slopes upwards so it was either that or use those strange offset hinges that kick the bottom of the gate out as it opens. A house up the road from me has got those, when the gates are open it looks like they are falling off their hinges, it's very odd. I still haven't decided if to paint the bolt heads the same colour as the gate or not, that's what the "black dots" are - they hold the hinges on. The buttermilk paint colour will darken within a few weeks.

The first picture made me realise just how wonky the rose arch was, hence why it magically straightens by the second picture! And clear up the pavement after that as the inconsiderate dog owner couldn't be bothered to :evil: