About Us
Door by Decora History
Doors By Decora is the culmination of three generations of Master Craftsmen whose attention to design, detail and quality have resulted in Decora Doors being proudly used by Home Owners and recommended by Architects, Interior Designers and Builders throughout the United States.
Decora Doors was founded in 1968 by John Smith, a woodworker from New Jersey. John relocated to Alabama and continued to build custom doors in the barn behind his home. In 1990 Charles Jones, who owned and operated a successful stained glass business recognized the market for a Quality Wood Door with Leaded Beveled Glass and started Doors By Decora.
Doors By Decora opened a showroom in Montgomery Alabama and took over the design and marketing of all Decora Doors. After the death of John Smith, Charles bought Decora Door from the Smith family and merged it into Decora Door, Inc. dba Doors By Decora. The Jones family still owns and operates Doors By Decora.
Our Manufacturing Facility and Showroom are located in Montgomery, Alabama. We have many customers that fly or drive in to visit our showroom. We sell direct to customers in our marketing area and in areas where we do not have dealers. You will find our staff very friendly and knowledgeable about our products and they can help you with measurements and other technical questions.
Today Doors By Decora is in the business of designing and building custom interior and exterior wood entry doors. We have our own Glass Studio (see examples) where we design and build custom Leaded, Beveled, Textured, and Stained Glass to go in doors, bathroom windows, and churches.
We can provide our glass insulated, tempered, and with impact resistant hurricane glass. You can order your door with a jamb. We can size (Pre-Hang) it to the jamb, cut for and provide hinges and door hardware. Your door system can be ordered unfinished, primed or stained and finished.
We are also distributors for most of the major brands of door hardware (see examples) and you will find our prices competitive. We crate and ship our doors all over the United States and to many foreign countries. We are truly a “One Stop Door Shop”.
Doors by Decora is proud of being a family owned business where every job we receive is personal and every step in the process shows how much we care. That’s why our end products exhibit elegance, quality and dedication to serving our customers.
We maintain over forty standard styles of doors to suit virtually every need. Many of the doors you see on the internet today are copies of original designs that Charles did to go on a custom home. Charles says that creating a new and exciting design, building the door and the glass and seeing the finished product installed on a home is his biggest motivation.
Every door is custom built to your order and our excitement about doing something new invites the challenge of custom designs.
Doors by Decora Quality
Decora Doors are handcrafted from the finest quality kiln dried hardwoods available. Choices include Mahogany, Knotty Alder, Cypress, Northern Red Oak, Ash, Maple, Antique Heart Pine, or other requested hardwoods. Paint grade doors are also made of hardwood such as Poplar , rather than pine or fir for lasting durability. Warping and splitting are virtually eliminated by selecting each piece of wood for proper grain and insuring the moisture content of the wood is maintained between 6% and 8%.
We skillfully blended beauty and durability in developing our “Continuous Oval Section”. This continuous section is an oval frame made from six individual pieces of wood and matching them into an oval. Because of this method, weak points that often cause splits at the top and bottom of ovals in other doors are eliminated in ours. Construction of this type is only done by hand and results in having as many as eighty-eight pieces of wood in one Decora Oval Door.
We take pride in the fact that through the years our innovations have successfully redefined the standards of quality doors.
Doors By Decora builds all of its stile and rail doors using cope and stick joinery. The use of 3/4″ X 4 3/4″ fluted hardwood dowels allow our exterior water proof glue to flow the entire length of each dowel. This type of joinery takes considerably more time but provides the strongest possible joints. All door components are solid hardwood. There are no cores or veneers used in a Decora door. We are able to prevent cupping of oak and similar woods by using our special laminating method of ripping, reversing the grain and edge gluing the wood. All of our standard style doors have raised molding on both sides. Other molding options are available such as fluted, ledge, dental, rosettes, keystones, and column tops. Our door styles are available open for glass, with glass, or solid wood. Options are also available to accommodate insulated glass or impact glass. Another new innovation from Decora is our “stain seep”. This curved edge on both our fixed and removable stop allows stain to seep behind this stop and eliminates raw wood showing when raised panels expand and contract.