This article was originally published on Domus 1071, September 2022.

It’s a tactile introduction that can give you a lot of information very quickly. It can tell you that the experience you’re about to have will be a pleasant one, or it can put you on your guard. It can convey a sense of grandeur or a sense of humour before you’ve had any other form of engagement. It sets the scene.

Many of our shops have bronze door handles made by the process of sand casting. It’s a method used in making bronze statues, and I learnt about it from our shop design department when I started to get interested in handles. There are many different variations but basically you make the shape of the object in a box of resin-bonded sand, cure it to make the mould, and then pour in the metal. Although it goes back thousands of years, it still serves its purpose in highly sophisticated modern applications

A friend of mine once watched the workers in the Ferrari factory in Italy sand-casting aluminium cylinder heads for the high-performance engines of their beautiful sports cars: an artisan method surviving in a world where computer-aided design and manufacturing normally rule. Perhaps less seriously, when you open the door to one of our shops in Japan you’ll take hold of a bronze handle shaped like a banana.

It’s quite a jokey thing, but it’s also a pop art reference to the Andy Warhol banana on the famous cover of the first Velvet Underground album. And it was made by the same process that the Chinese invented to manufacture iron farm tools, almost three and a half thousand years ago.