Some favorite clients gave us an interesting assignment this year to celebrate El Dia de los Reyes on January 6^th, which is the day the three kings arrived to baby Jesus, and the traditional day to open gifts in Spain and other Latin countries.

The Mortise elves were to produce and secretly install a new door in their Spanish Hollywood Hills home. We’ve worked with this couple several times over the last four or five years, and they are creative, receptive people for whom we’ve built many unique, custom pieces.

This December the husband arrived at our shop with an old and very flimsy piece of stained glass that his wife had picked up at a salvage shop in Chicago and driven across the country to someday use for a front door. That was 10 years ago and they realized it couldn’t function as a front door as the sodering was quite delicate in some parts, and the amount of wood needed for a 40” wide front door would make the glass inset look anemic and under scaled.

Mr. Crall  sneaked the vintage stained glass out of the garage and brought it to our shop where we reinforced it, and hand cut the wood around the shape of the glass.  Or glass shop expertly fixed a broken pane and reinforced the leaded cames. Secretly, we installed the door while the wife was at work and we helped make a very special special Dia de los Reyes--we even got some of the traditional Rosca de los Reyes bread.

 The stained glass traveled with the couple through two more houses, and finally this year they found the perfect spot in their new 1920’s Spanish house—an odd closet in the formal dining room was the perfect smaller scale to make it seem like the door was always part of the home, and was in a high visual area where they could enjoy seeing it every night.