Shining Light On 2020 by Taking Stock Of Interesting Hardware Pieces

The end of the year means we literally must take stock of all our products and this in turn hopefully gives us a clue as to what to focus on in 2020. This necessary accounting nightmare does have a silver lining and counting turn pieces, door levers, roses and back-plates is almost a therapeutic chore akin to clearing out the hall closet. What we found in so doing was quite an assortment of odd items that we rarely make which I thought I would share with you to see if you could spot their function.
Take the picture below and hazard a guess as to its use.
The length of the willow sprig provides the clue to its function as a window lever used for a custom residence to open and lock a window which was situated high at arm’s length reach.

Willow Window Lever

The size of the lever below and the child sized back plate do not help identify this piece as a lever and escutcheon for a lift and slide locking window which we first came across in Venice and which was ordered recently for a San Francisco residence.
The slim back-plate and the position of the lever to hardware buffs should make this trim’s use for a multi-point door obvious. For those not familiar with multi- point locks they are frequently used on French doors and tall doors to latch the door into the frame at several points and thereby provide added security. The multi-point lock runs the full length of the door and the lever’s acts to release bolts into both the header and sill of the door and to lock the door in place.

Willow Multi-point trim for French Doors Willow Trim for Lift and Slide Window

The pieces below may look like head wear or fashion accessories, but they are very small 2” castings used to secure the top and bottom of a sliding willow bolt used in a similar way to the multi-point above but decidedly less mechanical in function.

Luxury Handles for Windows by Martin Pierce

When we began our venture into functional art we started by assessing how doors and cabinets function and endeavored to make all of our art hardware suitable for most uses. We have described in other posts how we adapted our custom door levers and escutcheon designs so they would be compatible with privacy and passageway latches, deadbolts and mortise locks and could be specified according to the door function they performed. Needless to say we did not think of all the possible ways that a door lever could be used and so when our Willow collection was specified as the style for furbishing a complete home, including the windows, we had to create several custom pieces to fit the narrower dimensions of the window frame as well as act as a trim for a lift and slide mechanism that was being used to push open the heavy windows with minimal effort. Thankfully we had seen this type of window in use in Europe and New York so had a rudimentary understanding of the challenge. The results were 2 new additions to our collection of custom door handles.

                                                     Handle for a lift and slide window mechanism

As our homes and commercial environments evolve so we are regularly challenged to adapt and customize our work and recently this has taken us into adding LED lights to our door handles and soon we will be adding a new section to our site devoted to this new and growing area