Pull Handle Sizing for Double Front Doors

A pair of double front doors is one of the strongest statements a house can make from the street. The single most common way they get diminished: handles that are too small. A 300 mm handle on a 2400 mm door reads as an afterthought, no matter how beautiful the finish.

The proportion rule

The convention most NZ architects and high-end joiners use:

• Handle length should be roughly one-third of door height, rounded to the nearest standard length we offer.
• For a standard 2040 mm door, that's around 600–800 mm of handle.
• For a 2400 mm or 2700 mm tall pivot door, go to 1000 mm or longer.

If you're between sizes, go up rather than down. Oversized handles read as intentional; undersized handles read as mistakes.

Matching handles across two doors

Both leaves of a double door should carry the same length handle. If one leaf is fixed (a passive leaf) and the other is the active leaf, the passive leaf often has a non-functioning handle for symmetry, paired with concealed flush bolts top and bottom.

Back-to-back vs single-sided

For entrance doors, back-to-back fixings are standard. Both sides get a handle and they bolt through the door together. This is what every handle in our stainless range ships configured for by default.

Single-sided handles use through-bolts that thread into a tapped back-plate. We can supply this configuration on request, but the back-to-back option is structurally stronger on a door that gets used twenty times a day.

Fixing centres — the measurement that actually matters

When you order a pull handle, the size we list is the overall length. The dimension that matters for installation is the fixing centre distance — the distance between the two through-bolt holes. On most of our handles, the fixing centres are 80–100 mm shorter than the overall length (the curved or offset end portions don't carry bolts).

Glass doors

If you're fitting handles to frameless glass, every dimension has to be drilled to spec before tempering. Send us your glass thickness, hole positions, and total height, and we'll quote the right back-to-back configuration with the correct cylinder length and gasketing.

A note on offset handles

Our offset handles (where the gripping portion sits proud of the door surface on standoffs) need slightly more visual weight to read correctly on a tall door. Add 100 mm to whatever length you'd pick for a straight handle.