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The simple, carefully wrought dentil course of the doorheads lends a refining influence and pleasing sense of scale that seems to lighten the design very materially. Philadelphia has no handsomer example of the enriched pedimental doorhead than the interior treatment of the entrance doorway of the Blackwell house, Number 224 Pine Street.
Generally the architrave casing was miter-joined across the lintel, as at Upsala, but in many of the better houses this horizontal part of the casing was given an overhang of an inch or two to form the doorhead. How pleasing this simple device was, especially when a rosette of stucco was applied to each jog of the casing, is well exemplified by the doors on the first floor at Whitby Hall.
The pedimental League Street doorhead is supported by hand-carved consoles at opposite ends, that of the Germantown Avenue doorhead by fluted pilasters. An oval shell pattern adorns the frieze of the former, while a denticulated molding enriches the latter.
The nave is roofed in wood, but the chancel is vaulted, having ribs enriched like the chancel arch with cable moulding. The west front has a plain tower at the end of the south aisle, buttresses with Gothic pinnacles, a large door below and a round window above. The doorhead is a depressed trefoil, or quatrefoil, as the central leaf is of two curves.
The same entablature is carried about the inside of the roof, projecting over the doorway to form a much favored Philadelphia doorhead supported by flanking engaged columns.
They stand in front of more widely spaced pilasters, which are virtually a broadening of the casings of the door frame, and which support a second entablature back of the first and somewhat wider. The two combined form a doorhead with projection almost equal to a hood, but the effect is far more stately.
As usual, the walls are partly covered with beautiful tiles, mostly embossed with green vine-leaves, but round the door leading to the long narrow room, used as a servery, is an interlacing pattern of green and blue tiles, while the spandrils between this and the pointed doorhead are filled with a true Arabesque pattern, dark on a light ground, which is said to belong to the Palace of the Walis.
By omitting the entablature of the common horizontal doorhead and breaking the base of the pediment, the round arch of the fanlight was made to fit very nicely within the sloping sides of the pediment, the keystone of the arched casing occupying the upper angle beneath the peak of the gable.
The treatment of the latter wall of the hall is most elaborate. Three cased arches correspond to the open arches opposite. On the wall within the two end ones are handsome, pedimental-topped, inscribed tablets, while in the middle one is located the doorway with an ornate, broken, pedimental doorhead taking the form of a swag.
In other words, the recessed entablature of this doorhead replaces the fanlight of another type already referred to and of which the doorways at Number 5200 Germantown Avenue and Number 4927 Frankford Avenue are examples.
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