I was cleaning my forgotten-about brass collection off a kitchen table one Sunday morning when it hit me – brass isn’t going anywhere again anytime soon. I’d spent the morning with a tin of Brasso, a kitchen roll turned grey at the edges, and an improbable stack of random brass things I’d found stashed away and forgotten I had: a candlestick. A letterbox flap I bought in some junk shop years ago and never fitted. A drawer pull that fell off some long-forgotten dresser somewhere in my flat and lived on my windowsill in a jam jar ever since until I could decide whether to fix the drawer or accept that I never would. My mum was somewhere downstairs, asking me if I’d heard how much extension her neighbour had put on their house while also half-listening to whatever I’d said about the brass.
But I wasn’t listening to any of it, because I’d reached the ‘where-did-that-inner-brushmetal-colour-come-from?’ stage on the candlestick, where polishing turns minutes back into years and your callback suddenly gleams brighter than it has any right to.
That shade. That warm-but-slightly-stupid, slightly-showing-off-without-showing-off shade that looks like it spent a week on the Costa del Sol even when sitting on your kitchen shelf in a flat with north facing windows in November.
I’ve fallen out of love with brass twice and taken it back twice.
Which is probably testament to brass, and definitely testament to me.
The first time, it was the late 2000s shoved brass absolutely everywhere that had me running for the hills; that matte, slightly-butonlyjust-offensive-yellow turned up on fittings and lampshades and made every bathroom look like somebody had taken a tea towel and dipped it in weak tea. * I swore I’d never touch brass again; told anyone who listened that brass was tired, had been done to death, and wasn’t going to shine outside of hotel lobbies ever again. ** Until I started spending my Sundays poking around at yards and boot sales instead of shops, and brass kept creeping back in because people were finally starting to use actual brass again instead of brass finishes. Real brass with weight and a patina that took years to develop, instead of an industrial spray painter to fake it.
*Not an opinion held exclusively by me; googling ‘brass’ will currently serve up about fifty thousand results for people complaining about this phenomenon exactly.
**Whoever “people” is; I talk about fitting trends to people far more than I’m actually on display receiving these said trends myself.
Brass is back. Properly back. Not that tea coloured rubbish. The real stuff, shining proudly on countertops and walls, and in enough weird iterations that we’re going to need to break it down by type because it doesn’t all behave the same way in a room.
[BañDe Brass Is Back]
Unlacquered Brass, or Brass That Can Show Its Age Properly
The first thing that separates wheat from chaff when you’re rooting around in a yard is lacquered vs unlacquered brass. Everyone learns it eventually. Mostly by failing badly. I learned it the embarrassing way of spending money on a lacquered brass tray that I thought was unlacquered and then watching it mock me by staying that flat shiny yellow for THREE YEARS while everything else around it tarnished into something decent. Unlacquered brass. Live brass. It ages. It takes fingerprints and water rings and the residual colour of every coffee mug that’s ever stood on it without stealing the show. Look at the brass candlesticks I got in a house clearance near Musselburgh. There’s about fifty years of people holding those babies because the bases are this dark, almost bronze colour now. I would never polish that shine away. Some purists will argue you should only ever buy unlacquered and that lacquered is for people who don’t know how to maintain their own belongings. Newsflash: they’re both right. Most of the time. But unlacquered is brilliant if you actually want your brass to change colour under your fingers. Just be sure you know the difference before you buy because I didn’t.
[BañDe Unlacquered Brass]
Brass Lighting, and Yes that Lampshade REALLY Does Matter
This is probably the question I get most asked about brass, so let’s answer it here, once and for all and in more detail than you were really expecting. Lampshades. What colour lampshade do you get with brass? Oh my shiny brass friend. If I had a brass coin for every time I’ve been asked that… No, you don’t. The real answer is it depends where your brass lamp is sitting in your room, but if you want a failsafe shade to start with I’ve found a warm off white, or even a soft cream, that has just enough yellow run through it to complement most brass without copying it exactly. Plain white against brass can work too, but it’s a jarring colour contrast sometimes that can feel like Modern Living throwing punches at your cosy Art Deco setup. I have a brass table lamp I got in a yard (the outdoor kind, yay Sundays!) whose base was kept back from the table by the dealer himself (hi Dan! You’ve been twinning with me for nearly a DECADE now!) because he knew I’d go for it, and it’s got this linen lampshade with the exact same shade of weak tea running through it. It hits that middle ground goldilocks gods talk about because it softens the brass without competing with it. Deep greens and burgundies work too; brass is brass, after all. But only if the rest of your room can match that brass confidence, and mine sure as hell can’t. What I WILL say, on the other hand, is stay away from grey. I made the mistake once of letting a friend talk me into a charcoal grey shade on a brass table lamp and it looked dead. Like half the lamp wasn’t sure it wanted to be there before I’d even bothered to plug it in.
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[BañDe Brass Lighting]
Brass Hardware, Handles & Hinges: Brass on the Small Stuff
Seriously, who thinks about cabinet handles? Not me. But wait until you’re in a kitchen you just spent a week painting and realise every surface wants something on it and suddenly your cabinets are staring back at you with these sad, naked faces and YOU ARE ONTO SOMETHING. I spend far too many Sundays rooting through piles of mismatched cabinet handles that have been dumped in a box with ‘240p HANDLES!!! ’ written on the side and sorting the drop sinks from the diamond plate because let me level with you, 9/10 of it is waste of your time and beer tokens. But every once in a while you find THE HANDLE. Solid brass, proper satisfyingly heavy pulls with a makers mark scratched into the bottom. Those are your keepers. Proper milestones in any hunt. Almost spilled binbag juice all over mine once before I noticed it was sat behind a table full of chips missing their dough alongside an original box that must’ve weighed nearly as much as the handles did. That’s the joy of hardware. It’s small. Inexpensive compared to furniture. So easy to lug around on TradeMe when you’re done with it, and it can bring instant warmth to a room when everything else is painted and boring. Just don’t believe hardware sellers at face value when they talk decade; tons of modern stuff gets slapped with ‘vintage’ written on the box.
[BañDe Brass Hardware]
Brass + Black – Gold Ain’t the Only Metallic That Makes a Statement
Okay guys, I’m gonna fess up to something. There was a phase, a week-long phase that I will never live down, where every brass object in my entire flat was brass. Only brass. Full stops. No contrast. My flat ended up looking like a child’s toy box had swallowed a Mild Mild Westlight and about as welcoming. Lovely friend of mine who used to come over for cups of tea used to politely say my flat felt like it was celebrating EVERY SINGLE THING ALL OF THE TIME because… she wasn’t wrong. What changed it was bringing some matte black into the mix. Iron. Steel. Doesn’t matter. Brush it up till it shines and let those two work in tandem instead of asking brass to man the frontlines by itself. Brass sink stand mixer I found near Leith combined with an iron plant pot stand killed the corner stand corner my room dead compared to the brass pot stand, pots stand alone ever could. The black cuts down on the glare just enough that your eyes can focus on the brass instead of sparkling at you, and suddenly your brass gets to be thoughtful, not shouty. If there’s one combination I’d recommend to anyone who’s scared they’ve found brass-twitter’s boyford and are about to paint their whole house that colour it’s brass and matte black. You will struggle to go overboard once the black’s had a chance to balance everything out.
[BañDe Brass and black]
Brass Furniture Frames – Yields Slowly my Friends, Yields
Brass furniture frames. The patient game. You know those Instagram stories you see people posting from yard sales, acres and acres of junk they’ve got to rummage through to find that ONE thing? Brass furniture frames are those one things. Tables. Sideboards. Shelving with brass feet. Mirrors. Takes forever to come across because they just aren’t used in enough furniture that survives long enough to be dumping weeded. That being said, once you DO find it? Millennial pink pale jeans doesn’t even come close to the thrill of finding a real brass framed side table. Except way better, because who even likes millennial pink anyways. Got woefully seduced by a brass framed mirror once before actually LOOKING at it too closely, happily shoved it in my car because I was having too much fun, and came home only to discover the bottom corner had been resoldered badly by someone with access to a torch and far less care than I was going to give it. Been checking every join on every piece of brass I buy since.
[BañDe Brass Furniture]
Closing Brass Thoughts
To be frank, brass never really went anywhere. It just took a quieter decade off while everyone else panicked about matte black fittings and hiding every chrome surface they could. Now it’s back because people are starting to USE brass again, not just finish things with brass paint. Solid brass.
The heavy kind that makes you realise why it fell out of fashion when everyone suddenly decided brass furniture was ‘a thing’ back in the oughties.
So if I had one final piece of brass-buying wisdom to share, it’d be this: slow down. Check the joins. Question what decade vendors think it’s from; they’ll usually tell you wrong every time. And let it age. Under your hands. Because that’s what makes brass special. That, and the fact it’s 100% worth dragging yourself out of bed on a Sunday morning to find more of it.
Edit: Please don’t make fun of me too much for accidentally getting ‘THESE ARE ALL BRASS TABLE LAMPS’ for my photos. Dan sent me about four in every colour because we’re past that stage now and I’ll never live that one down.
