Real quick. Picture two homes. In the first home, there's a polished brass light switch that catches light and your reflection, as it did the day it was first installed. It's still just as bright and proudly immune to the fifteen years of hands that have put it to use. In the second house, a similar brass light switch is unlacquered, so it turns a beautiful dark honey at its center and stays a pale gold at its edges. Which home would you prefer to live in?
Brass has been having this debate with itself for roughly two hundred years, ever since it moved out of church bells and ships' fittings and into our homes. Brass was cheaper than bronze, warmer than steel, and became the working metal of domestic life in Britain and America sometime in the Georgian era of the 1800s, and never really left. Unsupervised, brass is naturally adventurous and a hopeless romantic. Its love language is physical touch. It darkens. It develops a beautiful patina from collecting the atmosphere of a room and holds the memory of every hand that touches it.
Lacquered Brass Makes the Case for Staying the Same
Lacquer enters as this nearly invisible layer applied over the brass fixtures. It's like the material equivalent of a person with excellent boundaries. You can think of the lacquerists' position as a case of commitment to the post purchase honeymoon phase. It allows brass to keep all of its seductive warmth, golden depth, subtle glow, and jewelry-like quality without surrendering itself to the evidence of time spent. Of course, preservation like this comes with its own rules. Lacquer is protection, but it's not impenetrable armor. If you use abrasive cleaners or are careless when handling it, you risk damaging the coating and revealing the patina in different areas across the surface. Brass was free to be loud and lacquered through the disco-bright seventies and eighties, then fell almost entirely out of favor for two decades of chrome and brushed nickel. How ironic. Both of these are two finishes that built their success off the back of the lacquered brass argument that came before it.
Unlacquered Brass Makes the Case for Getting Older
Unlacquered brass is more promiscuous and craves conversations with time as opposed to trying to resist it. Unlike its impeccably preserved lacquered and polished counterpart, unlacquered brass shows up as its most honest self; it's luminous, and completely vulnerable to whatever happens next. Over time, unlacquered brass creates a finish specific to the home it lives within. Which requires a certain level of confidence, to be fair. And if nostalgia for the original warm brilliance should return, you can always polish it back to its former self. But then again, after spending years to acquire that kind of character in your home, do you really want to erase it so abruptly?
What Our Taste in Brass Says About the Way We See Time
The pendulum constantly swings between the two approaches to brass. Our preference for which brass condition has become a cultural barometer for how we feel about aging. For years we wanted the well-behaved, polished brass in all of its bright, gleaming, and carefully lacquered glory. It was protected from the indignities of daily life, and so we could be too, as we lived vicariously through its perfect mirror finish. Lacquered brass argues for permanence. After years of celebrating imperfection, we've found a renewed pleasure in things that remain immaculate. Then the perfection became too easy to manufacture, and we rushed back to patina as proof of authenticity.
Maybe that pendulum will keep swinging back and forth forever because, much like the seasons, our desires change and reflect the times we're in. We also tend to want the impossible, like the combination of something that changes with us while simultaneously remaining exactly as beautiful as the day we first fell for it. How irrational of us. Charge it to the game though and proudly pick your finish.
The brass finishes featured in this story reflect two approaches to living with time—you’re either preserving a material as it is or allowing it to change through use. This is not an indictment of a lack of taste. Images courtesy of the public domain. This story is part of Residence Supply’s Power of Imagination campaign. Shop our latest Polished & Unlacquered Brass collection.
