are you meaning to talk molding applied to a doorway ? or decor around doorways?

If you are talking about trim, in a couple of contemporary houses I have been in (actually contemporary rehabs of old buildings) there was no trim around open doorways.

In one of the houses, the doorways with doors in them had the appearance of no trim because the wall surface came to the edge of the jamb, so the jamb, in essence, was hidden, and the flush doors sat flush with the wall on their hinged side. Some of the doors had conventional hinges, some had a top and bottom pivot hinge, some had hidden Soss hinges.

The other house had a museum reveal, essentially, or a channel--between the trim and the wall surface. It did this also around the baseboard: so the drywall stopped with a square edge about 5" away from the door opening or floor, then there as a 1/2" channel or groove, then the 4-1/2" trim was flush with the wall surface,or floor in the case of the baseboard. This was done with special drywall trim pieces. This is an extremely expensive detail because the channel was continuous from above the baseboard around each door opening and it all looked very true and square.

Here is a link that might be useful: Fry Reglet

Palimpsest is (as usual) right about the cost of clean untrimmed doorways...even the simplest ones. The reason is that the finish must be absolutely pitch perfect, and the clean edge gives you no margin for settling in a new house. If it doesn't look clean and perfect, it just looks like a cheap apartment.

The reason for trim is to cover the raw edge of the wallboard, and to provide a strong nailing surface over the structure of the jamb for hanging doors. It allows for a little settling, requiring only re-caulking later on, and protects the more fragile wallboard from the slings and arrows of life and stuff moving through the doorways.

Some modern designs handle this with wider, higher doorways than the standard 30" or 36" width and 6'8" height, and sometimes by trimming with flat boards given a bevel or very simple bead on either edge, and mitered at the corners. This also requires expert proportional design and craftsmanship, but is more forgiving than no trim at all.

One of the really nice details the early modernists did with door openings was the 8-foot door with 8-foot ceilings. So the door would be jambed on the sides and there would either be nothing but continual ceiling above, and continual floor below. Or, sometimes there would be a small stop on the ceiling.

The problem with this was that unless the house was *really* square and flat, the door would scrape on the unlevel ceiling as it dipped slightly.

So the next step was the almost 8' door with a full jamb around it just the width of the trim,--the few inches at the top kept it clear of the ceiling, but it wasn't as clean as the original intent.

This was one of the first details --or non-details :)-- dropped from many builders of modernist houses. They just gave up and went to conventional height doors.

--One MCM detail that I really miss is the centered doorknob. The hardware is no longer produced and it was problematic and balky anyway. Plus you did not have much leverage on the door since you were pulling on in a lot closer to the pivot point. But it sure was cool looking.

Thank you all, Palimpsest I think I hear what your saying and have seen it. I will go look again and see if I can adapt to my situation, well I just looked again and my tile stops so close to the opening I am going to have to come up with another plan.
hummm to get stumped on such a stupid detail........well as they say tho "it's all in the details" I'll keep working on it.

Palimpsest, I, too, love the doorways with no headers. (The 8' ceilings, not so much...!) One modern house lived in by a ridiculously prosperous friend of mine had several just such doorways, about 5 feet wide, and the doors themselves were huge pairs of silky varnished wooden pocket doors with barely perceptible stainless steel wheels set deeply into the top and bottom edges. They were gorgeous.
I love her, and her horribly rich husband, too, or I'd have been sorely tempted to hate them!