Plate rather than pickets: the face is closed steel divided into rectangular panels, each panel carrying a raised laurel wreath around either a fleur-de-lis or a rampant lion. The leaves meet on a ring medallion split down the centre with an initial inside it, and a raised arch above the middle is filled with dense openwork scroll — the only place light comes through. Black throughout, closed across a gravel drive.
Each wreath is cut from its own plate and laid back onto the panel behind it, so the ornament works in shadow rather than in line. The subjects alternate as they go — a fleur-de-lis beside a lion, then the order reversed on the row below, so no two of the same sit square to each other. Openwork scroll under the raised arch and the split ring at the centre are the only places light gets through a face that is otherwise closed, and they are what stop it reading as a wall.
A buyer choosing this one is after an entrance that stops the view instead of framing it, right across the full width of the drive. Relief work needs raking light before it registers at all, so it wants an open approach and pillars with mass enough to answer the arch — and a matching leaf in the wall alongside, or anyone arriving on foot is left waiting on the drive gate.
3 photos
Every angle
