LETTER 13. FIELD NOTES: HARDWARE JEWELRY

Let’s chat about one of the smallest decisions in a room, with one of the best potential impacts: hardware.

The pulls on a cabinet. The knobs on a drawer. The lever on a door. The hook on the back of a pantry. The small brass or bronze or nickel or unlacquered thing that the hand touches every day, several times a day, for the rest of the life of the room. Most people think of hardware last, if they think of it at all. I think of it the way I think of jewelry — as the finishing detail that changes how everything else reads.

This letter is a note on the two hardware houses on my mind right now. One I have been specifying for years:

A French atelier we have been specifying for years; this is a go-to hardware house when a room needs a piece of hardware that will be the moment of the room. Their work is closer to sculpture than to millwork.

Everything they make is drawn by hand first, cast in small batches, and finished by a person who has spent years learning the specific patina. The materials are extraordinary. Solid brass in weights that surprise you when you pick them up. Nickel in finishes that catch light differently than any commercial product I have used. Their pulls are things I have specified for a single wardrobe door, one piece, because that door needed one thing to elevate an entire dressing room, and their pieces have done it.

They also, quietly, make some of the most beautiful hooks and small hardware I have ever handled. A single Mi & Gei hook in a mudroom, in solid unlacquered brass, will do more for the room than anything else you could put on that wall. That is not an exaggeration. That is a specification I have made multiple times in the last year alone.