...YTF does anyone use knobs in the first place? Ordinary sensible door handles have been invented, you know. The only reason to use a round slippery thingamabob would be if you've got pets (or, for a few short years, toddlers?) that you don't want to be able to open the door by themselves.

And, as usual with stupid-ass backwards shit like this: "Only in America". (Well, OK, maybe the rest of the Anglophone world too? From film and TV, you get the impression it's about fifty-fifty in, say, the UK and Australia.)

When it comes to doors more generally, for once the US avoids being the weirdest in the known world with it's stupid-ass round slippery doorknob thingamabobs, being beaten to the pip by the weird UK habit of hanging doors that are towards the corner of a room the wrong way around, creating an impractical and a-social niche behind them when they're opened. Not that second place is much to brag about in this particular contest.

If you have a door at or near the corner of a room, and it is hung along the edge nearest to the corner, then it opens ninety degrees towards the wall adjacent to the corner (the other wall, not the one the door is in). Then the opening is visible from the whole room, and vice versa.

If, OTOH, it is hung on the edge fartest from the corner, opening it ~ninety degrees creates a temporary niche hidden from most of the room, and most of the room hidden from it. To get visibility you have to open it 180 degrees towards the wall (the one it's hung on).

To me, the former feels so obvious as to be the only sensible way to do it; the latter so weird I couldn't even imagine doing it that way until I saw it in British films and TV shows.

The "pre" (or "tt" or other monospaced) HTML tag(s) do(es)n't seem to work here, so to see the below (IBM Extended) ASCII art in all its glory, you'll probably have to copy-paste it into something that can display in a non-proportional font.



┌──────────────────┐            ╒══────────────────┐
 x                 │             x                 │
├───               │            │                  │
│                  │            │                  │
│                  │            │                  │
└──────────────────┘            └──────────────────┘
X: Friend, or zombie hungry for your braaaiiinnnsss? In one case you know, in the other it's hidden by a stupidly hinged door.