Door Stops

Fabric or cast iron

Both hold a door. A cast iron stop is heavier for its size and lasts indefinitely, and it will also chip paint off a door edge and scuff a wooden floor when it is kicked into place, which it will be. A fabric one is soft on every surface it touches and can be nudged with a foot without consequence.

The trade is bulk: a fabric stop needs more volume to reach the same weight, so it is a larger object in the room. In a hallway with painted doors and a wooden floor that is a trade worth making. Known as a door stopper in the United States, where the same reasoning applies.

What makes one heavy enough

Weight is what does the work, and fabric stops get it from what is inside them. Sand is the common filling, sometimes combined with polyester to give shape as well as mass, and a stop around one and a half kilograms will hold a standard internal door against a normal draught.

It will not hold an external door in wind, and nothing of this size will. If a door slams in a through-draught, the answer is a hook or a floor-mounted stop rather than a heavier weight.

The handle, and why it matters

Most of ours carry a fabric handle stitched across the top, which sounds like a detail and is not. A weighted stop dragged across a floor is exactly how a floor gets scratched, and a handle means it gets lifted instead.

It also makes the thing genuinely portable, which is how door stops actually get used: carried from the bedroom to the hallway when the weather changes, rather than living in one place forever.

Where they earn their place

A hallway door that swings shut on its own. A bedroom door in a house where you want air moving in summer. A kitchen door propped open while cooking. A nursery door held at a set gap so you can hear the room without the door catching in a draught.

They are also one of the few genuinely decorative things that has a job. A patterned stop at the foot of a door reads as deliberate in a way a rubber wedge never does.

Care

Fabric door stops are generally not washable, because the filling cannot go through a machine and cannot be removed from most designs. Where a product page says not washable, that is what it means rather than a precaution.

Brush it, or use a vacuum upholstery attachment, which handles the dust that anything living at floor level collects. Lift it by the handle rather than sliding it, keep it off a wet floor, and it will outlast the door.