This trip we were particularly struck by the variety and the beauty of the doors we passed as we walked about Budapest and Prague. With nothing particular in mind, then, we paused to take pictures of a few of them.

Essentially, a door is just a removable covering for a floor-level opening in a wall. That's hardly the sort of thing poets sing about. But, still, doors can be more than merely utilitarian portals, and in the past they often have been.

Of course that's not so today. Doors are seldom even notable in these more modern times. Today a commercial building’s main door is most often just a slab of glass with stainless steel fittings or, worse, it’s a glass and steel revolving door.

(Surely, there is nothing less aesthetically pleasing than a revolving door. It’s a people-processing machine and, as such, chillingly efficient.)

A few modern churches may be given noteworthy doors and a very few institutional buildings, but they are the exceptions.

There was a time, though, especially in Europe, when elegant doors were quite common, created as a significant architectural element in their own right, works of pure craftsmanship, even art.

Then as now, custom architecture was often an unaffordable extravagance in residential or commercial buildings, but even buildings that were modest in size and boasted little architectural flair were often given doors that expressed the individual tastes and values of the builder/owner/tenants. They were designed to make a deliberate, individual statement to all who passed by and through them.

One expects the doors of a cathedral or an important public building to be grand, but as we walked in Budapest and Prague, time after time, we found ourselves equally admiring the doors of these lesser buildings - ordinary offices, apartments and shops.

The design and workmanship of their creation is often exceptional, seeming even more exceptional in their very ordinary settings. Who, after all, expects to find a pastry shop guarded by mahogany lions or a dentist’s office behind an intricate wrought iron gate?

Sadly, most European architecture has now gone the way of its American counterpart, with buildings inspired by filing cabinets and accessed by merely functional doors. But many of the best efforts of the builders of other centuries remain to be seen in the old cities of Europe. And, as evidenced by the care they are so often given, elegant doors are still appreciated.

Who knows, perhaps by their example the prevailing style could change again.