I came across milk doors one day when I was deep-diving into old home features, and I immediately fell in love with them. I can’t believe I had never seen these practical-yet-whimsical features before — because if you search TikTok, there’s actually a surprising amount of milk door content.
What Is a Milk Door?
Way back before the days of widespread refrigeration, people had their milk delivered daily. They’d leave out their empty jars or pails from the day before, and a milk delivery person would bring large containers of milk to fill it the next day. After the invention of milk bottles, especially once they figured out how to put a cap on said bottles, milk delivery became more convenient, but the delivery person needed a solution beyond setting the milk on the doorstep and having it get warm if no one was there to collect it. Enter: the milk door.
A milk door is essentially a small insulated box with an access door on the interior and exterior of the home that would protect the milk from the sun and keep it cool until someone was able to grab it. According to Joe Raboine, vice president of design at Oldcastle APG (who actually had a home that had a milk door!), they were a common feature in homes built in the late 1800s through the 1950s.
“It was a very efficient and sustainable way to have fresh milk. After refrigerators became standard in most homes, the milkman and milk door fell out of use,” says Raboine. While refrigeration is a modern miracle, I do miss milk doors.
The Modern Milk Door
With the rise of grocery delivery, homeowners are starting to warm to the idea of this cool spot. For example, Fresh Portal is a company that has created a sort of modern milk door — a cold storage box that has access to both the interior and exterior of the home. But this modern take also includes an exterior door that locks and is only accessible to a delivery driver with the one-time access code. The interior door is also locked, so you can access the goods when it’s convenient for you.
Plus, as TikTok revealed to me, some older homes still have milk doors — and it’s up to the homeowners to take advantage of them.
Should Milk Doors Make a Comeback?
I would argue that a modern milk door absolutely has a place in today’s world. I mean, how cool would it be to use a milk door to provide your kids with cold beverages on a hot summer day without having them traipse through the house?
You could also use it to create cute outdoor displays as a place to store outdoor toys or leave things you sell online to be picked up by the buyer, or a way to let small pets in and out of the house. A video on TikTok shows how these homeowners refinished their milk door as an homage to the original house.
While Raboine doesn’t think that there’ll necessarily be a resurgence of milk doors in their original form, he does think a modernized version could solve a modern-day issue. “Most people today are receiving orders daily from e-commerce retailers,” says Raboine. “Those packages often sit outside in the weather, where they can be damaged or stolen. If we added the equivalent of the milk door for today’s world, it would solve those issues. Perhaps they could even be used for food delivery? Either way, it may be time to reconsider a cool feature from years gone by for today’s new homes. Perhaps we are about to enter the era of the ‘package door.’”
This post originally ran on The Kitchn. See it there: The 200-Year-Old Practical Feature I Wish Every Home Still Had (It’s So Whimsical!)