Getting a Handle on Doors: Take It or Lever It

I really thought I had it--yet another way to pry into the inner workings of the psyche simply by observing how people perform an innocuous everyday task. I thought it was possible to guess the thickness of peoples’ wallets by watching them open their front doors.

The premise was based on two basic motions. If the householder reaches for the door as if he’s preparing to shake hands, I figured, he’s probably a working stiff, a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy who drives a Chrysler, has 2.3 kids, likes Disneyland, never misses “Cheers,” drinks domestic beer, and thought Margaret Thatcher got a bum deal but still catches himself using the word “girls.”

On the other hand, I guessed, if he reaches out palm down, as if he’s about to pat the dog, he probably keeps up with the polo scores, knows what coquilles St. Jacques is, drives a car that no one will insure, has a wife named Bootsie and exactly two kids, reads the business page before the comics, and thinks the Concorde is just too damn slow.

The difference, in theory, was this: the first guy is reaching for a knob. The second chap is reaching for a lever.

But the knob/lever personal economic postulate fell to the ground as soon as I realized that the lever has begun to show up in the United States on everything from boardroom doors to the laundry room.

Not too many years ago, you had to go to Europe to open a door with a lever. Every door on the continent had a lever, except for the ones that were attached to cathedrals and required a few dozen serfs to muscle them open and shut. If you weren’t used to the levers, you could crack a few fingernails on them before finally deciding that they were linear and not circular.

After a while, though, you probably decided that they were kind of elegant and actually practical since all you had to do to open the door was press down instead of applying torque like Jim Abbott throwing a curveball.

And you weren’t alone. Levers began to appear all over America as part of the latest spasm of Euro-envy. The reason doesn’t really matter, though. This is one imported idea that seems to work just as well on this side of the Atlantic.

The door hardware manufacturers know all about lever mania, of course, and their inventories reflect it. Also, they know that America’s dormant penchant for do-it-yourself, which has fully awakened as a result of the recession, dovetails neatly with the relatively simple task of putting a new piece of hardware on a door. After all, if Americans are going to spend money on do-it-yourself home improvement projects like they did last year (they parted with an estimated $101 billion), why not build some new door doodads into the budget?

The people at the Anaheim-based Kwikset Corp. have pounced on this idea, and the result is a pretty nifty crash course in door hardware installation that you can pick up for $5.99 at various home improvement centers. It’s a 10-minute how-to video that tells you all you need to know in order to install knobs, dead bolts, handsets and the simple yet patrician lever.

There’s a welcome bonus with the video. Enclosed with it is a detailed set of written instructions to back up the visual ones on the TV. The idea is to watch the video, stop it at the indicated intervals, perform the task at hand with the aid of the written instructions, then return to the video for the next step. It’s good, unintimidating Bob Vila-esque stuff.

One bit of business may make you gulp, however: It’s possible that you’re going to have to bore one or two big holes in your door to accommodate the new hardware. Don’t despair, though. Perform the work by the numbers--remembering, as the video urges, to plan out each task before doing it and to always measure precisely--and your new lever will fit neatly into what may at first appear to be a mortal wound.

Ah, yes, the lever. Don’t think that the models on the market today are anything like the stark, angular handles you might have seen on that trip to Switzerland in 1974. Today, it’s possible to find levers with ornate scrollwork, decorative etching and grooving, graceful “S”curves and finishes in brass, white and black marble, briar wood, chrome, even gold plate.

Prices range from about $15 for a simple brass assembly to $300 for one of the briar wood or marble models, said Steve Price, Kwikset’s vice president of marketing.

And there’s something else, something that you can’t know until you open a door fitted with a handle. The things just feel good. Also, elderly and disabled people have a much easier time with them. Check out the way the doors open next time you visit a hospital.

Levers are actually mandated in public buildings by federal codes that apply to the disabled, said Price, who said that demand for levers over knobs is likely to increase with what he called “the graying of America.”

But let’s not get too clinical. We were talking about the stylish, sophisticated, snooty door lever; formerly snooty, actually, since the thing has become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer possible to use the lever as a yardstick for wealth.

Besides, there’s a better way to calculate a person’s economic well-being--using their door-reaching behavior as a test. If they don’t raise their hand to the lever at all, it means they’re bucks up. The butler opens the door.