Brass is one of those materials that most people recognise without ever really thinking about. It is on old front doors and ship’s instruments, on the taps in a good hotel and the hinges of a grandparent’s writing desk. It catches the eye in a room without ever shouting. We work with it every day, and we still think it is one of the most beautiful materials there is.
Two metals, one colour
Brass is an alloy: copper with zinc added, melted together. That is the whole recipe, and it is a surprisingly flexible one. More copper gives a deeper, redder gold. More zinc makes it paler and brighter. Small changes to the mix change how it machines, how it bends and how it takes a finish, which is why there are dozens of different brasses rather than one.
What they all share is that colour. Steel reads as cool and technical. Chrome reads as clinical. Brass reads as warm, which is why it sits so easily next to oak, walnut, marble and painted joinery. It is a metal that feels at home in a house.
Two thousand years of choosing it
People have been choosing brass for things that matter for a very long time. After the monetary reforms of the Emperor Augustus in 23 BC, Rome struck some of its everyday coins, the sestertius and the dupondius, in a brass the Romans called orichalcum. It was valued above plain copper, partly for its golden colour.
Since then it has been used wherever something needed to look good and keep working: scientific instruments, clocks, ship’s fittings, door furniture, musical instruments. Those are not things people expect to replace. That is a fair summary of what brass is for.
A pleasure to work
Part of the reason brass has lasted is that it is a joy to make things from. It cuts cleanly on a lathe and a milling machine, holds a crisp edge and takes a knurl beautifully, which is why our connectors look the way they do. It does not fight the tools. Free-cutting brass is the yardstick against which the machinability of other copper alloys is rated.
That matters to you as much as to us. A material that machines well can be made accurately, and accurate parts are what make a shelving system go together cleanly and stay together.
Built to last, and to be used again
Brass contains no iron, so it does not rust. It does not swell in a steamy kitchen, does not crack along the grain and does not delaminate. Treated with a little care, a brass shelf will still be doing its job long after most furniture bought at the same time has gone.
And when, many years from now, something made of brass finally does reach the end of its life, the metal does not have to. The Copper Development Association describes brass as recyclable an unlimited number of times without losing its chemical or physical properties. Workshops collect their brass offcuts and turnings rather than throw them away, because the scrap is worth most of what the metal cost in the first place. Very little brass is ever really wasted.
A living material
There is one more reason people love brass, and it is the one that takes longest to notice. Brass changes. Over the years it mellows and softens, a little darker in the corners and a little brighter where hands rest. Bare brass is even naturally antimicrobial: in 2008 the US Environmental Protection Agency registered copper alloys, brasses included, as surfaces that kill more than 99.9% of certain bacteria within two hours, as a supplement to normal cleaning rather than a replacement for it.
Our finishes are sealed, so we would not claim that last point for our shelves, and sealing also slows the change in colour. It does not stop brass from being brass. It still ages gently, the way good materials do, and we think that is part of its beauty rather than something to be polished away. We will look at finishes and patina properly in a future post.
Why we build in brass
We could make shelving from steel and paint it gold. It would be cheaper and quicker, and it would look fine in a photograph. It would not age well, it could not be refinished, and in ten years it would look like what it is.
Brass costs more and asks more of the people working it. In return it gives you something that looks better the longer you live with it, and that will still be worth something long after you have finished with it. That seems to us a fair exchange.
If you would like to see and feel it for yourself, order a set of our finish samples. They are real brass, finished in exactly the same way as our shelving, and the cost comes off your order when your project goes ahead.
From all of us at the Brass+Co workshop, Staffordshire.