Changing the lock on a Baix la Mar house without spoiling the door

Baix la Mar grew up between the castle walls and the port, and until the 1970s it was where the fishermen and sailors lived. The houses are low and narrow, painted in indigo blue, lime white, ochre and red, and laid out in streets that run parallel to the shore. The quarter is protected as a site of local relevance, which is part of why it still looks the way it does.

For a locksmith, the defining thing about these houses is simple: one door, straight onto the street. No hallway, no communal entrance, no second barrier. Whatever is on that door is all there is.

What you usually find

Old timber doors, often heavy and often painted many times over. The lock may be an old mortice, a surface-mounted box lock, or a later cylinder fitted by someone who cut into the wood to make it fit. It is not unusual to find two or three generations of hardware on the same door, some of it no longer doing anything.

What you are trying to achieve

Two things that pull in different directions:

• A lock that actually protects the house, especially if it stands empty for part of the year.
• A door that still looks like a Baix la Mar door from the street, in a quarter protected for its appearance.

The good news is that they rarely conflict. The working parts of a lock sit inside the door or on its inner face. What shows from the street is a keyhole, a handle or knocker, and perhaps an escutcheon.

How it is normally done

1. Keep the door and its ironwork. Knockers, handles and old plates stay where they are. If an old lock is not used any more, it can often be left in place and simply no longer relied on.
2. Put the security inside. A modern lock with a good cylinder can usually be fitted to the inner face or into the thickness of the door, so the street view changes as little as possible.
3. Mind the frame. On an old door, the weak point is often the frame and the keep, not the lock. A strong lock screwed into soft old wood is only as strong as the wood.
4. Match the finish. Where something new does show, choose a finish that sits with the door rather than shining on it.

Before any work

If your house is affected by the protection, check with the town hall’s planning department before changing anything visible from the street. A locksmith can tell you what the lock needs; the council decides what the façade may carry. In most cases a lock change touches nothing it cares about, but it is better to ask than to undo.

And if the door has been tried by somebody else already, there is a separate set of questions: see securing a door after a break-in.