Just moved to Europe from the US and have been thinking about something I’ve noticed on previous visits: The doors.
Our apartment door could probably stop a police battering ram as well as high-powered rifle fire. The deadbolts come out of at least two sides (I haven’t examined the top). You have to turn the key seven times to unlock it.
Why? Crime, especially violent crime, is so much lower here. This is the kind of door you’d laugh at as evidence of paranoid delusion if a US prepper survivalist had one installed on his house. Why do Europeans demand this level of security for their homes?
Um, are you sure you haven’t been to prison? I’ve been living in Europe for decades. I’ve only ever seen doors like the ones you describe in prisons (not as an inmate, by the way, but as a visitor during a criminal trial).
I can’t answer the question, but I can confirm that my time in Ireland, Scotland, and England presented me with much better exterior doors than I’m used to in the US. In fact, my wife and I frequently notice this when watching British TV shows. Even the doors in “cheap” flats seem to have very nice frames, doors, and hardware, often with multiple bolts engaging the door to the frame. You certainly see high-quality doors in the US, especially in new construction, but they’re still not usually up to the level I’ve seen in person and on British TV.
As always when someone asks about something “Europe/European”, I have to ask, where exactly In Europe? It’s a continent consisting of 47 countries and even more cultures. I’m German and have visited the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Croatia in Europe, and never have noticed such an apartment door. Especially not a lock you have to turn seven times, that’s bonkers.
I’ve definitely seen doors like the OP described in Italy (I can’t vouch for seven times, but multiple rotations of the key to engage multiple bolts). As to why, I have no clue.
My house in Italy had a door similar to what is described in the OP. In Germany, I’ve lived in an apartment and a stand alone house. There was nothing remarkable about those doors–except they lock automatically. My last house had really solid, hard wooden doors. Back in the States now and I’m pretty sure my front doors are metal–but, thin and light. Not as heavy, solid or sturdy as the one in Germany.
100% Sure I could easily kick in my front doors if I needed to. With little effort.
Not sure about the one in Germany. Probably could with enough effort and enough kicks.
We have a high-quality door in our house, but our house is only 13 years old. The front door is extremely solid. That’s definitely not the case everywhere I’ve lived; in fact, when we moved in, I was kind of shocked to see how strong the front door was, because most every other house or apartment I’ve lived in has had a flimsier door. So it must be a new construction trend in the US.
I don’t know where the OP was in Europe, but doors like they described are ubiquitous here in Israel. I have one myself. It’s made of steel bars, sheet metal and polystyrene insulation, and I think it has 6 or 7 deadbolts, on all 4 sides. Most of them are manufactured by a local company called Rav-Bariach, known internationally as Mul-T-Lock.
I live in a low-crime neighborhood; doors like that are just considered basic home security.
Here’s a website showing the internal workings of one model. It’s in Hebrew, but I’ll translate if you have any questions:
Another “where are you?” post. In the last ten years, I’ve stayed in hotels and visited people in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic. The doors are mostly more solid than the door on my home in the northeastern party of the USA, but none was as solid or as complex to open as what you describe.
None of mine in the UK or Ireland (about 22 in 10 years) have been particularly reinforced.
One oddity is you typically “push” to enter a store. Dunno about places like nightclubs where fires and quick exits are important.
In Russia, however, the outer steel door is thick and opens outwards. The “old” door opens inwards, during different times (I was last there in 2015 and think the reinforced doors were a thing of the 90’s).
To do a “wellness check” in St. Petersburg on my father-in-laws door they must have used a massive battering ram. Old dead guy, a dachshund who happily must have made it 9 days plus and some pilfering of jewelry, as is the custom.
In Spain, particularly southern Spain, the rotate 6-7 times locks were common. I couldn’t make sense of them either. Sometimes they were 3 stage – open, handle locked, bolt locked – but they could still keep turning them 3-4 more times for no purpose that I could see.
Some of them were also a major fire hazard because you couldn’t unlock them from the inside simply by turning the handle like you can for pretty much any door in the US. And all doors in the US would have a manual bolt operation. On those doors, if you didn’t have your key, you couldn’t open the door from the inside. That seems absolutely bonkers to me. It was common to keep the key in the lock for this reason.
In southern Spain it was also very common to have a locking metal gate at the front door of hotels and other buildings that looked like a medieval castle gate, even in modern buildings. They offered a significant physical barrier. Apparently this is sort of a traditional style/architecture quirk more than a necessity. In southern Spain they were at war with the moors for 800 years and a lot of the architecture / city layouts reflect that even 500 years after that was all finished.
When I was first in Ireland, it took me quite a few times to figure out that you locked the door (knobset) by lifting up the lever door handle. That’s very, very rare in the US. The lock itself used two hefty bolt to do this. Makes perfect sense to do it that way, since pushing down on the lever would both unlock/unbolt and unlatch the door for egress.
It’s not always easy to compare crime rates within a country, let alone between them (different definitions of crimes, some police are more diligent at reporting statistics than others, etc.), but there are several European countries that report substantially higher rates of burglary than the USA.
Which matches my understanding of the situation, which was that the USA has an unusually high rate of intentional homicide, but on many other crime metrics we’re pretty average within the developed world.