Doors and Windows

Looking at the Traditional Door

When I started making the first doors, I got rather fascinated by why traditional yurt doors were made the way they were.

I spent a good deal of time talking with a yurt maker in Mongolia who had written extensively about yurts, and we got into the sort of details I love: joints, glues, timber, the way the lattice pulls against the doorway, why the threshold is there, why one joint runs one way rather than another.

The more you look at these things, the more you realise that very little is accidental.

A yurt door is not simply a house door made a little smaller. In a conventional building most of the load around the doorway is acting downwards. A yurt is a tensile structure and the lattice is pulling at the doorway from both sides. That changes things.

Even the direction of the mortise-and-tenon joints matters. The tongues run vertically so that the frame is working with those sideways forces. The threshold is important too. It helps keep the frame stable, but it also does the very ordinary and useful job of stopping wind, rain and dirt coming straight underneath the door.

I love this stuff because it is where the old yurt-making knowledge stops being merely traditional and starts making complete practical sense.

Finding the Right Balance

Understanding the traditional door gave me a starting point. The next question was how to make the sort of door I actually wanted to put into one of our yurts.

I wanted something substantial enough to last for years and function well, but lightweight enough not to destabilise the yurt. A big heavy door swinging on the side can put a surprising amount of force into what is, after all, a tensile structure.

So there is a whole raft of things to think about: the joints, the weight, the dimensions of the timber, the threshold, the way the frame connects to the lattice and the proportions of the whole thing. You make prototypes, see how they behave, change things and try again.

And then there is the other part of it. It has to look beautiful. That matters just as much to me. A door can work perfectly well and still look wrong in a yurt. The proportions have to feel right and the door has to look as though it belongs to the structure around it.

Getting the Finish Right

Even the finish took us a number of years to get right. We tried different exterior finishes, looking for something that would protect the wood for years without losing the feel and character of the timber.

Eventually we found a German manufacturer making the beautiful water-based finishes we now use. The colour, the way the grain still shows through and the way the finish stands up outside are all part of getting it right.

It took a few years before I felt we had really got the doors where I wanted them. Since then it has mostly been incremental improvements. We keep looking at what we make, and when we find a better way of doing something, we change it.

Then Came the Window

Windows came later, and I resisted them for quite a while. I was very traditional about yurts in those days. I had spent years trying to understand what made the original structure work and look right, and I was not particularly keen to start cutting holes in it simply because houses have windows.

Then a guy who came to work with me wanted to make a yurt for himself, and he wanted a window. I still wasn't convinced, but eventually we made one.

It was brilliant.

Suddenly you could put a window exactly where you wanted the view, or where you wanted air and light, without losing the feeling of the yurt. I changed my mind rather quickly. We never looked back.

Since then the windows have developed in exactly the same way as the doors: fixed and opening versions, different sizes, better seals and small improvements over the years. But that first one was the moment I realised that respecting the tradition did not mean freezing the yurt in time. You could add something genuinely useful, provided you did it properly and it still belonged to the structure.

And Then the Glass Wall

The next leap came in 2013. We were working with a pair of artists from Norway who wanted something a bit special. By then we had doors and windows that worked, so the question became: what happens if we open up much more of the wall?

We built the first Glass Wall yurt for them and the effect was immediate. It completely transformed the space. There was this vast amount of natural light and suddenly the landscape became part of the room.

What excited me was that we had not lost the yurt in the process. It still had the chestnut frame, the oak crown, the curves, the proportions and that wonderful enclosed feeling of a yurt. But now one side could open out towards the landscape. Ancient and modern somehow sat together beautifully.

That first one felt fresh and exciting, and it still does. Since then we have pushed the idea in all sorts of directions, from a single glazed door and window to broad walls of glass with double doors and opening windows. But it all grew out of that first experiment.

Made to Our Design

However elaborate the arrangement becomes, the test is still the same. The door or window has to work properly with the yurt, last well and look right.

Over the years we have kept refining the designs, changing small things when we find a better way of doing them and holding onto the details that have proved themselves.

We want to be proud of them when they become part of one of our yurts, and we want the person who owns the yurt to feel the same way.

“Thanks to you and Ratna, I have this incredibly beautiful yurt with so many windows that I have all the light I need for my work as a painter.” Jannicke Camilla, Spain