This morning, I walked around Bunclody and noticed that most front doors were painted in multiple vibrant colors and crafted with distinct shapes and styles...
Do you know why Irish doors are so colorful in Ireland?
I searched the internet and here is what I found....
Ireland was colonized by the English and when Queen Victoria, nicknamed the “Famine Queen" in Ireland, died in 1901, the Irish were told to paint their doors black in mourning. In rebellion, they painted them in bright colours.(LiveMint)
Painting the doors an unusual colour was the only way for the people who lived in these affluent new developments to make a house distinctive from the outside. (Culture Trip)
Irish Poet Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty would return home drunk from the pub each night and end up knocking on his neighbour Moore’s door instead of his own. Annoyed, Moore painted his door green so that even a drunk Gogarty might be able to distinguish between the two. (LiveMint)
Women painted their doors so their drunk husbands wouldn’t mistake other homes for their own and crawl into bed with another woman. (OurItalianJourney.com)
In the 1970s, Bob Fearon (head of an ad agency in NYC), was in Dublin on a commercial shoot. Taken by the beauty of the Georgian doorways, he took forty photos with the anticipation of creating a photo collage wall art for himself. Once back in NYC, he showed it to Joe Malone who thought it would be perfect for his Irish Tourism office display window on St. Patrick’s Day. This collage generated a high and unexpected level of interest from people walking by.(OurItalianJourney.com)
What about you? What colour is your front door????
It never occurred to me that our doors were more colourful than in other countries. Our front door is glass with brown surround but our back door is red.