The doors were built in the 16th century for the King of France’s summer palace in Burgundy. Sometime in the 19th century, they were removed from the Royal’s palace and stowed in a warehouse. The massive, hand-carved, 6-panel doors with the original jam and black wrought iron hardware were sold at auction and ended up in San Francisco in the late 1800s.
A few years later, the doors were salvaged from one of the hotels in San Francisco when the great earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906 destroyed the hotel and most of the city.
Holmes never appreciated or wanted the doors for his office, but because of their history and the fact that no other office in the building could support their size, the doors stayed. They are fourteen feet tall, ten feet wide, and made of two-inch thick solid Birdseye hardwood maple. Their color is lighter than the rest of the room’s dark walnut wood trim and hunter-green walls.
Birdseye maple is very rare, and it’s not a variety of woods or a species of maple. The small, dark Birdseye motifs are created from a phenomenon that occurs because of an anomaly from a fungal or viral infection that lives and grows inside the tree. Typically, this rare wood is saved for small, expensive specialty products. For example, the dashboard of a Rolls Royce automobile is made from Birdseye Maple. It is very unusual and hence, very valuable to find such a large, solid piece of wood that was used exclusively to make these distinctive doors.
Usually, the small darker swirling eyes of the Birdseye maple are distributed randomly and evenly throughout the wood. However, the wood used to make these doors had a defined conglomeration of these small eyes or imperfections that are noticeably darker and tightly grouped together in the same location of each door. This collection of the darker Birdseye within the wood grain on each door formed half of a large oval design. This unusual look may have been perceived as a flaw, but the carpenter who created the doors some 500 years ago must have seen the uniqueness of this wood. He intentionally designed the doors so that when they were closed, the half-oval circles came together, creating a perfect oval-shaped like a human eye.
In the middle of this oval design and countersunk into the wood is the round, black wrought iron hardware, consisting of a doorplate and door handles. The unique design of this hardware forms a perfect black circle that looks like the pupil of the eye when the doors are shut.
As much as Holmes wanted his privacy, he left a single door open most of the time because when the doors were closed, he felt the eyeball was looking directly at him, witnessing his dishonesty.
This swirling design within the wood grain was subtle, and most people didn’t notice the resemblance of a peering eye, but after the image was brought to one’s attention, it would be difficult not to think about anything but a large eye looking at you. Holmes had never discussed this feature of the doors with anyone and didn’t really know if anyone else saw the same design. Sometimes he wondered if the vision he saw was detected and equally disliked by one of the French noblemen centuries ago, and that was the reason the doors were banished to storage.