Kitchen Ironmongery: Brass, Bronze and Iron at Ten Years

The handles and hinges outlast the paint, so it is worth spending an hour on them before you spend money.

Ironmongery is the part of a kitchen you touch every day and think about least. It is also the part that dates a room fastest when it is wrong, and the part that quietly makes a room feel right when it is not. The choice is not really a style choice. It is a materials choice, and every material behaves differently over ten years of cooking, cleaning and children.

What follows is what we have seen come back through the workshop, and what we now recommend when a client asks.

Unlacquered brass

Unlacquered brass is a living finish. Out of the box it is bright, almost yellow. Within weeks the areas you touch — the belly of a cup handle, the top of a knob — begin to lighten and warm; the areas you do not touch begin to darken. After two years it looks like something. After ten it looks like nothing else. You can bring it back to bright with a wadding polish and half an hour, or you can leave it alone and let it settle into a dull, uneven gold that suits an old house.

Clients either love this or find it unbearable. There is no middle position. If the idea of a handle looking different in six months troubles you, do not specify unlacquered brass, because it will and no supplier can stop it.

Lacquered brass

Lacquered brass is the same alloy with a thin clear coat sprayed on to hold the factory finish. It works, until it doesn’t. On knobs and pulls that see daily use the lacquer wears through at the friction points within about five years — sooner on a busy family kitchen, longer on a second home. Once it fails it fails patchily: bright brass where the coat has gone, dull brass under intact lacquer, and a hard edge between the two that no cleaning cloth will disguise. Stripping and re-lacquering is possible but rarely economic; most clients end up either replacing the handles or accepting the patchiness and treating it as unlacquered from that point.

We say this to clients before they order. Lacquered brass is a five-year finish sold as a lifetime one.

Aged brass PVD

PVD stands for physical vapour deposition — a thin, hard coating fused to the base metal in a vacuum chamber. It is what the better bathroom brands moved to when they got tired of lacquer complaints. In an aged-brass tone it looks convincingly like brass that has already lived a life, and unlike lacquer it does not wear through at the handle bellies. Ten years in, a PVD handle looks essentially the same as the day it went on.

The trade-off is honesty. It is a coating, not a metal, and if it is chipped hard enough to break the coat the base shows through. In practice this almost never happens on a handle. It is a good specification for a client who wants the look of aged brass without the maintenance of the real thing.

Solid bronze

Bronze is heavier than brass in the hand, warmer to the touch in a cold room, and darker to begin with. It patinates rather than tarnishes: the surface deepens, brown to near-black at the edges, keeping a warmer glow where fingers pass. Ten years in, good bronze looks like an old tool — used, considered, unbothered. It is our preferred finish for the OAK range, where the timber is already doing the warm work and a bright brass would fight it.

Bronze costs more than brass, weighs more in shipping, and rewards it in the hand. It is the finish clients most often ask us to change to once they have handled a sample.

Cast iron

Cast iron is the traditional country finish — rim locks, thumb latches, butterfly hinges, the whole cottage vocabulary. It looks entirely at home on an English painted kitchen and entirely wrong on a veneered flush one. In a kitchen it needs waxing, because kitchens are wet environments and iron rusts. A microcrystalline wax once a year on any piece near the sink or hob is the usual regime. Left un-waxed, iron will bloom into orange freckles within eighteen months near the kettle.

Most clients dislike the freckles. We wax at handover and tell them.

Stainless steel

Stainless is the finish nobody puts on a mood board and everybody is grateful for in a scullery. It does not tarnish, does not need waxing, does not care about steam or salt. It is honest in the sense that it looks like what it is, which is a piece of metal doing a job. In ten years it looks identical to day one, give or take a scratch or two that a Scotchbrite pad will lose.

We specify stainless in utility rooms, boot rooms and behind-the-scenes areas where the priority is that a wet dog and a full kettle do not create a maintenance job. In a main kitchen it takes a confident architectural scheme to make it read as chosen rather than defaulted to.

Nickel

Nickel looks like chrome from three paces and quite different close up — softer, warmer, with a slight cloudiness to the reflection. Polished nickel tarnishes gently to a smoky grey; satin nickel holds its finish longer but can look a little corporate in a domestic setting. Both are softer than brass or bronze, and edges will round with wear rather than chip.

It is a good finish for a scheme that wants the coolness of chrome without the hardness. We do not use much of it.

Weight, and what you are actually paying for

A pressed-metal handle from a mainstream brand and a solid-cast handle from a specialist look, in a photograph, more or less the same. In the hand they are not the same object. The solid piece typically costs four to six times more, and the reason is not brand — it is grams of metal and hours of finishing. A cast handle has weight when you lift it, cold mass when you touch it, and a small resistance when it moves that the pressed version cannot fake. Over ten years the pressed one loosens on its bolts; the cast one does not.

We are clearer with clients about which is which than the market usually is.

Suppliers

We keep to a small number of makers whose casting and finishing we trust, and who will still be there in ten years to match a replacement handle. We send a shortlist tailored to the range and the room. [CHECK — Torben to confirm which suppliers, if any, to name.]

Hinges

The hinges are where a bespoke in-frame kitchen either behaves for thirty years or starts to sag in five. Our doors are heavy: solid timber face frames, 18mm birch-faced ply carcasses, painted panels or solid oak. A standard European cup hinge is not the right specification for that weight on an in-frame door.

We use solid brass butt hinges, three per door on anything full-height, sized to the door and screwed into pilot-drilled hardwood. On larder doors and any door over about 1500mm we go to four hinges and heavier gauge. This is old practice and it is old practice because it works. A butt hinge fitted properly into solid timber will outlast the paint on it.

Catches, soft-close and glazed doors

Soft-close mechanisms are excellent on drawers, where the mass and the runners are engineered together. On in-frame doors they are less convincing: they add a damper into a system that was designed to close cleanly under its own weight against a ball catch, and when the damper fails — as any moving part eventually does — the door stops closing properly.

Our default on painted in-frame doors is a brass ball catch, adjusted at fitting so the door closes with a soft, definite click. On glazed doors — the astragal cabinets in MOULDED, or the display uppers we build into most kitchens — we always use a ball catch or a small rare-earth magnet rather than a push-latch. Push-latches require the client to press against the glass to open the door, and glass and repeated pressure are a poor combination.

The details in this trade are small and mostly invisible. They are also the difference between a kitchen that ages and a kitchen that wears out.

Ironmongery, honestly: what brass, bronze, iron and the rest look like after ten years