The Dallas Estate Gate
A named commission. The design can be built again — under its name.
Four solid steel panels across two leaves, each carrying a slim applied frame with fleur-de-lis at the corners and a quatrefoil rosette set at its centre. A close-set row of spear finials runs the full length of the top rail. Black throughout, with the ornament rubbed back to a copper-bronze highlight, hung between white stucco walls across a concrete drive.
Solid panels leave nothing for light to pass through, so every effect here has to be laid on the surface. The applied frames stand far enough off the sheet to throw their own line of shadow, the fleur-de-lis at the corners are the only places that outline breaks, and the finials give a flat top rail a serrated edge it would not otherwise have.
Privacy is the brief this answers: nothing of the drive or the yard reads through it, which is the opposite errand from the Inman Gate and its field of open scrollwork. It wants masonry either side rather than a fence line — against stucco the panelled leaves carry on the line of the wall instead of interrupting it.
3 photos
Every angle
