The Power of a Door...
“Your front door is the handshake of your home.”"
Every home is unique. Even homes built off plan on large housing developments, that follow a standard layout, once the owners have moved in and started to stamp their personality onto their house, soon become distinct and different from all their neighbours. These variations can be subtle or they can be obvious, but they are always present.
One of the most important elements of any home is the front door. Symbolically, the front door plays a very powerful role in making you feel at home. It is the physical barrier that separates 'your space' from the wider world and enables you to move between those two worlds. It protects you from the outside; it is (usually) the place that visitors will seek out when they come to visit you.
Very often the front door is one of the most important personalization's that people will make to their house, or a key defining physical characteristic that embodies much of the house's fundamental characteristics.
This important role that doors play in the character of a property is sometimes problematic when you try to create a Lego model of someone's home. However good the rest of the model is, if the front door is not representative of the real thing, the impact of the whole model can be significantly diminished. Unfortunately, whilst Lego has over the years created many different door types, there is often a significant gap between the available Lego doors and the real doors that are so important to our homes.
The usual approach here is to try to adopt the 'best fit' and find a door which most closely resembles the real thing, but this isn't always easy or successful. For unusual door types it is of course possible to ignore the standard Lego door types and create a bespoke one out of smaller bricks and sometimes this can be very effective, especially for larger, 'statement' doors. However this often creates additional complications (such as how to implement and integrate hinges) and isn't always practical where a 'standard' sized door is required.
Another way of approaching this issue is to use a plain panel and create a custom sticker with a 'picture' of the real door. This can be effective and is relatively easy to implement, but the results can be disappointing.
An alternative is to design a custom door to fit standard Lego door frames and 3D print it. This does mean that your model will contain 'non-Lego' parts, and the time involved in designing and printing the door can increase the costs a little, but it can have a very significant positive impact on the success of the overall model.
We offer custom printed doors on all our models. Where a standard Lego one exists that is a close match, we will recommend that you stick with that, however if you have a specific need for a custom door, we will be happy to print one which forms a better match.
Note: At the moment, we can only offer single colour custom doors. We hope to be able to offer multicolour printed doors in the near future.
Jonathan Dean
21st September 2026
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