Why brass darkens, and why we let it
Every house that works in brass faces the same question on day one: lacquer it, or leave it. We leave it. Here is the argument for a metal that refuses to stay new.
The bench is a slab of end-grain oak, scarred in a rough oval where forty years of hammer blows have landed. Everything the house makes passes across it.
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, and it behaves like neither. Heat it and it moves like butter; let it cool and it work-hardens until it fights back. That fight is what you can see in a finished piece — the surface is not decorated, it is the record of an argument.
“A mould remembers one decision. A hammer remembers every one you made.”
Which is the honest reason we do not cast. Not romance about the handmade — simply that a cast piece can only be as good as the day the mould was cut, and a struck piece can be better than the last one.