The door photography craze can be traced to 1970, when a New York ad exec created a colorful collage of 36 arched Georgian townhouse doorways he shot while on a project in Dublin. As the story goes, the adman showed the assemblage to the head of the Irish tourism office in Manhattan, who commissioned copies with the simple tagline “The Doors of Dublin.” The poster led to a book of the same name, and spawned a tourism boomlet of people who wanted to see the doors in real life.
Today, the list of Instagram feeds riffing on the door theme—including one with 2.8 million followers—is so long that we lost count. But @cvilledoors is near and dear to our hearts. Lyndsey Brown launched the feed in June and had gained 145 followers by summer’s end.
After moving from Preston Avenue to a place on Park Street, Brown and her fiancé, Mike, began taking long neighborhood walks with their dog, Ollie. “North Downtown has such beautiful homes, and many people have put great care into their exteriors,” Brown says. “As we walked, we’d always notice the unique doors and point them out to each other. It became a kind of game.”
The game became the Instagram account, and the rest is history. You may take the photos at face value, or read a little into them like Brown does. “Doors are interesting because they’re interactive and functional,” she says. “Choosing to have a beautiful or unique door says something about the style and character of the people inside.”