“New finish options allow customers to coordinate their entire homes, from faucets to floor registers,” say the helpful folks at Signature Hardware — who sell one heck of a lot more than mere hardware to help make every house beautiful. They’ve added two new finish choices for fixtures to their exclusive Nottingham Brass line of products: Antique Brass and improved Polished Nickel finishes are now being offered.
Antique Brass has a distinctive appearance that mimics that of actual aged brass. While this finish still exhibits the warm, golden tones that are characteristic of polished brass, it also features darkened shades on textured areas. A beautiful brushing throughout adds elegance and consistency to the finish…
The second finish, Polished Nickel, has been enhanced for deeper color and superior reflective properties. With a greater concentration of nickel in its composition than ever before, the distinctive shine and dark tones of the finish are now even more pronounced. The first finish available over brass, traditional Polished Nickel complements nearly every type of home décor.
The samples shown here, at left, are from Signature Hardware and represent something of the wide choice in finishes for hardware that is available to home decorators these days. Antique Brass is thrid from the top, and Polished Nickel is the fourth one up from the bottom.
Antique Brass was extremely popular in the 1970s, as an upscale alternative to shiny gold-look brass, and it’s making a strong comeback in North America in decorative door hardware, floor registers, and other accessories. Polished Nickel is a very traditional look that complements almost every style of home decor, from the ulta-modern urban to country-rustic with antiques.
I’m also very keen on the Oil Rubbed Bronze, the bottom image, but I think you’d have to be careful how and where you chose to use this finish so that the fixtures wouldn’t overwhelm the rest of your decor — for best effect, I’d want to make the fixtures themselves the focal point of a fairly neutral room, perhaps with white porcelain and soft sage-green walls…