Oil Rubbed Door Handles

Light or Dark or both?

 Choosing the right finish for your door handle can be a challenge. While the English language may provide innumerable ways to describe the color of a patina and while images of pieces in situ obviously help, we often find that perception of color and noun use are incredibly subjective. Moreover, the finish of the patina in our opinion should not be monotone but should allow for variation without which the patina piece will look dull and the beauty of the bronze alloy will be lost. 

Images are useful guidelines. 

The cabinet hardware pages of our website show each piece in a light and dark oil rubbed patina. 

As you can see from the above image, each piece has different flat and recessed sections and since the fluid patina settles in the recesses 2 different pieces finished with the same chemical patina may appear quite different. Smooth surfaces will slough off the patina so our contemporary cabinet pulls are light sand blasted to roughen the surface so the chemical can adhere.

Highlights 

Our patina artist has honed his craft over the years to create subtle beautiful finishes. The nose, toes and and tail tip of the gecko are very gently buffed as are the wing tips of the butterfly to re-expose the golden bronze beneath the patina.

Choose both?

Our door sets create a mix and match option used to full advantage recently by the talented Georgina Rice.To continue the plated nickel finish of the Willow pieces in the bathroom she designed while keeping the bronze tones of the hallway we plated the Willow knob in an enamel and oil rubbed the exterior knob.

Below you will see how the Willow knob set has been used to achieve a split finish knob set.

Mushroom a fruit of nature and imagination

When I think of fruit my mind conjures up images of persimmons, strawberries and other sweet delicacies that I am fond of but it does not bring to mind mushrooms. This January we discovered a rather humorous and very suggestive mushroom in our garden and I was intrigued to learn more. The internet journey was helpful and I learned  that the mushroom in our garden is known as the stinkhorn which explains why our food obsessed dog gave it only a passing sniff.

The mushrooms in our collection of cabinet pulls like so many of our pieces are not a literal portrayal of any specific mushroom rather they are  a synthesis of different mushroom types that we cook with and that we grew up with. The toadstool, portobello and shitake mushrooms shapes are the closest to the shape of our left and right mushroom pulls. So what is our small double capped button mushroom pull closest too?

I discovered that the button mushroom, cremini and portobello mushrooms are not different species but rather different stages of the same species, Agaricus bisporus. The button mushroom is the young immature form and is characteristically paler and milder in flavor. The cremini stage is somewhere in the middle with a more defined flavor and the portobello is the mature adult with a very full meaty flavor. As the mushroom develops its anatomical parts are more easily seen and are labelled here.

The mushroom is the visible fruit of  a much larger fungus and the gills of the cap contain the spores which allow the fungus to continue reproducing. The mycelium is the vast root system of the fungus and it can cover acres and is critical to most plant life. I have labelled the mushroom parts in my greyscale photo of our left facing mushroom.