An engineer, steam, pressure and waste wood.

Masonite began as the name of a material before it became the name of a door company. English Wikipedia credits the process to the American engineer and inventor William H. Mason, who in 1924 worked out a way of turning wood chips into board using heat, steam and pressure. The fibres were blown apart with steam and then pressed into dense sheets, and the result became known after its inventor as Masonite. Wikipedia’s article on the material cites two United States patents for what it calls the Mason method and dates the patent to 1924 in Laurel, Mississippi.

The company itself followed a year later. A company history that Masonite published on its website, preserved by the Internet Archive in 2011, says the corporation was formed on 1 September 1925 under the name Mason Fibre Company, and that the name was changed to Masonite Corporation in 1928. English Wikipedia says Mason raised money from lumber companies in Wisconsin and in Laurel to start the business, and that work on the first plant in Laurel began in late 1925, to make insulation board alongside the new hardboard.

The board travelled further than the town. English Wikipedia, citing a 1961 article in The Journal of Southern History, says Masonite licensed facilities in Australia, Canada, Italy and Sweden, while Mason went on to receive further patents connected with the material. The company’s own timeline describes the 1930s and 1940s as a period when Masonite spread into many markets abroad.

Hardboard found uses well beyond building. Wikipedia’s article on the material lists doors, roofing, walls, desktops, canoes and guitar bodies among its uses in the 1930s and 1940s, and notes that artists have often painted on it. A booklet from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Masonite and American Art of the 20th Century, is cited by Wikipedia for the point that Charles and Ray Eames used Masonite hardboard in postwar furniture, including pieces designed for Herman Miller.

Facings, owners and a Toronto door maker.

The move towards doors came slowly. Both Masonite’s 2011 timeline and English Wikipedia say the company entered the door business in 1972, as a supplier of moulded wood-composite door facings and other components to door makers. The same timeline says that in 1960 the company built a research centre, then called the John M. Coates Technical Center and later renamed the Masonite Innovation Center. Crain’s Chicago Business visited the centre in West Chicago, Illinois, in 2017.

Ownership changed several times. The New York Times reported on 27 March 1984 that USG, the gypsum company, would acquire Masonite, and in October 1988 the Chicago Tribune reported that International Paper would buy Masonite from USG. Masonite had meanwhile become a supplier to Premdor, a door company based in Toronto, which the 2011 timeline says entered the door business in 1955 and merged with Century Doors in 1989. CNN Money reported in October 2000 that Premdor had agreed to buy Masonite from International Paper; English Wikipedia says regulatory approval followed a year later and the deal closed in 2001.

That deal is where the modern company comes from. English Wikipedia, citing The Globe and Mail, says Premdor changed its own name to Masonite on 1 January 2002 and adopted the tagline “The Beautiful Door.” The company timeline adds that Masonite sold the Craftmaster business in 2002 under a 2001 consent decree, and bought the residential entry-door division of The Stanley Works in 2004. In the United Kingdom and France the company long kept the Premdor name, according to the same timeline.

The next two decades brought more changes of owner. The 2011 timeline says Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) acquired the shares of Masonite International Corporation in 2005 and took it off the New York and Toronto exchanges. In March 2009 the company filed for Chapter 11 in the United States and for protection under the CCAA in Canada. English Wikipedia says Masonite listed on the New York Stock Exchange again in 2013 under the ticker DOOR, with its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

The current owner arrived in 2024. In a release dated 15 May 2024, Owens Corning announced that it had completed its acquisition of Masonite International Corporation, that Masonite shareholders had approved the transaction on 25 April 2024, and that Masonite’s shares would be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. The same release named Chris Ball, previously president of Masonite’s global residential business, as president of Owens Corning’s Doors business.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make windows, doors and roof windows: the frames, sashes, panels and glazing that close the openings of a house. Window and door brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that began in a small joinery or a sawmill town to names that now belong to much larger building-materials groups, and a single brand can be sold through dealers, builders, lumber yards and home-improvement chains.

A window or door brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a name, a label on the frame and the showroom signs and advertising that go with them, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, merged with a rival or moved its factories over the decades. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its windows and doors are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A material’s name on a front door.

The most unusual thing about Masonite’s identity is that the name was a material long before it was a door brand. For decades “Masonite” meant a sheet of brown hardboard: the rear cover of a radio or television set, a painter’s board or a guitar body. English Wikipedia lists Danelectro among the guitar makers that used it, and the material appears in the work of artists and designers, as the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art booklet on Masonite and American art sets out. The door company inherited all of that recognition in 2002, when Premdor adopted the Masonite name.

That choice tells its own story. Premdor took the name of the company it had bought rather than keeping its own, and English Wikipedia records that it paired the new name with the tagline “The Beautiful Door.” The 2011 company website described Masonite as a registered trademark of Masonite International Corporation, listed national sites from Mexico and Israel to Japan and Korea, and still used the Premdor name for Great Britain and France.

The hardboard itself also links the old and new companies. The 2011 timeline says that Masonite began supplying moulded interior door facings in 1972, which put the material on the face of other makers’ doors before Masonite sold finished doors under its own name.

Since 2024 the brand has sat inside a much larger building-materials group. Owens Corning’s release of 15 May 2024 described its new unit as its Doors business, led by a former Masonite executive.

For a design guide, Masonite shows how a name that began as a material, pressed from steamed wood fibre in Laurel, can become the brand of a door company and pass through several owners, from USG and International Paper to Premdor, KKR and Owens Corning. Compare it with Owens Corning, its owner since 2024, and JELD-WEN, another door and window maker. For this guide we use hardboard brown, tan and blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Masonite’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.