Composite front door and stable door, Drayton Parslow

Two composite doors on one bungalow, in two colours, doing two different jobs. The front door is in a small porch off the block paved drive. The stable door is round the side, in the passage between the house and the garage, up a brick step. Neither opening was new: there was a yellow front door there already, with a leaded rose in the glass, and a painted side door with a blind hanging behind it that had done its years.

The front door slab is solid, with grooves cut across it on the diagonal, so no light comes through the door itself. It comes through the full height glazed sidelight next to it instead, which is what keeps the hall as bright as it was. A long brushed bar handle runs most of the height of the opening edge, with a black letterplate low down. Every Distinction door we hang carries AI Secure locking, an APECS 3-star cylinder and an ILH Duplex multipoint lock, and the slab is accredited by Secured by Design, the police-backed standard.

The side door is a stable door, split across the middle so the top half opens on its own while the bottom stays shut and locked. That is the whole reason to fit one: air and daylight into the back of the house without the opening standing wide, and something still across it at knee height for a dog or a small child. Each half locks on its own, with the lever handle and a cylinder on the top leaf and a second cylinder on the bottom. The top leaf is glazed in a single square pane, both halves carry vertical boards, and a weather bar sits across the joint to throw rain off the split.

The colours are colza yellow, RAL 1021, on the front and traffic orange, RAL 2009, on the stable door. The house had a yellow front door before this one, so the colour is not the change, the door around it is. The orange is not on the standard chart: Distinction match to any RAL on request, which is worth knowing before you settle for the nearest colour that is on it. Both doors sit in dark grey frames against red brick, and every composite door we fit carries a £5,000 security guarantee, terms applying.

Both are the same 44.5mm insulated slab, which is a compression moulded glass reinforced polyester skin over a foam filled core, with polymer edges and engineered wood stiles behind it. The colour is in the skin rather than painted onto it, and that matters more on these two than it would on a white door: a bright yellow and a traffic orange are exactly the colours nobody wants to be repainting every few summers.

This customer got their price from our instant quote tool.