The support decides, and in Tassin more than elsewhere
Reinforcement keeps your door and strengthens it: a folded steel skin over the leaf, angles protecting the frame, a multipoint lock, anti-lift pins. An armoured door set replaces the lot — leaf, frame, lock, hinges — designed and tested as a single assembly. The two routes suit neither the same doors nor the same walls, and Tassin puts both within a few hundred metres of each other.
In Le Bourg the frames are bedded into stone. That is excellent anchorage, provided the original timber is sound and the bedding is made good by someone who knows the material. Cladding fitted to a rotten frame simply transfers the whole force of an attack onto its fixings. The timber and the bedding are therefore probed before the solution is settled.
La Demi-Lune raises a different question: getting the thing in. An armoured set arrives in one piece, and the stairwells of these early twentieth-century blocks are narrow, with landings where a leaf cannot be swung freely. The width of the flights, the half-turn at the landing and the room to manoeuvre are measured before ordering, not on the day of fitting.
Non-standard sizes, co-ownership rules, consistency
Doors on the village houses of Le Bourg frequently fall outside catalogue dimensions. An unusual height, an old rebate, a frame that is not square: a stock armoured set will not go in, and making one to measure becomes the only realistic route. The survey is done with the door closed and then open, to see what actually moves.
In a co-owned block, as in the older buildings of la Demi-Lune, how the leaf looks from the landing is governed by the rules, and the syndic is asked before the work. A tenant needs the owner's written agreement: reinforcement alters the property, it is not the swap of a single component. The order matters — agreement first, survey next, fitting last.
And reinforcement protects an opening, not a home. In the houses of Alaï and Vaubonne, a front door that becomes the strongest point simply moves attention to the glazed door onto the garden, the garage, or a ground-floor window on the lane side. On these sloping plots, the back of the garden is usually the side least visible from the road.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our door reinforcement page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Tassin-la-Demi-Lune.