Showing Your Mettle with Home Hardware

By Betti Sands

Some sconces are brass. Some are chrome. A dining room ceiling fixture is black wrought iron.

Some doorknobs are white ceramic. Some are brass. The one for the basement door is brushed nickel. The kitchen cabinet hardware is brushed nickel. The kitchen light fixture is chrome.

Sound like a showroom? It isn't. It's a home - a home where forethought had clearly not come into play.

Home hardware is a defining aspect of décor. A seeming detail, it can have a big impact on a room. Think about a plain, flat, white kitchen cabinet door. Now think of it with smooth, clean, brushed nickel cabinet knobs and pulls. Now imagine the same door with miniature silver anchors as pulls. Or little clay kitty-cat knobs. There's an endless array of hardware for cabinetry and fixtures, each giving a different spin to the room. How do you begin to choose?

One guideline from many interior designers, is: Choose your metal.

Iron. Brass. Nickel. Chrome. By choosing, and sticking to, one metal in the home (at least on the first floor), you'll be ahead of the game when it comes to creating a well-thought out, uniform look in your house.

Of course, you can do it room by room: Brushed nickel in the kitchen; wrought iron in the dining room. But if look into the dining room from the kitchen, and you're the kind of person who did too many of those "what doesn't belong" exercises as a kid, it might be anxious making. The next question then, is what do you choose for the living room? Iron sconces? Silver? You see, it gets tricky.

But by choosing your metal and sticking to it, you will have a more sophisticated look, without sparing choice. In fact, it could help to rein you in as you start to select from glossy catalogue pages and sample boards in the showrooms.

Right now, brushed nickel is still popular. It carries through the look of matte stainless steel kitchen appliances. It's a clean, modern look (although some designers think that, very soon, stainless steel dishwashers and stoves will go the way of avocado green refrigerators). Brass is more classical - a good look for traditional homes. Chrome can go ultra-modern or retro (think Chrysler Building). Bronze is great for modern kitchens, or even retro (think 1940s file cabinets at the most basic level). There are also variations like antique copper, polished chrome, nickel, aged bronze, and polished, sterling, or antique brass. So consider your interior and narrow your choice based on that style.

The next step is to decide what goes where. One guideline is that if the doors in the room where you're using the cabinet hardware have handles, you might opt for pulls on your cabinets. If you have knobs on the big doors, go with knobs for the cabinet doors. Another guide is size: pulls need a bit more space than knobs.

Some people go with both: knobs on the cabinets and matching pulls on the drawers. Then comes style. As mentioned, brass presents a classic, elegant look. If your home has a lot of antiques, you can go with more ornate, vintage or actual antique brass. Here, you can get into smooth knobs with subtle rims or outlines; or more elaborate patterns in the metal, like leaves, pineapples, fountains, starfish, seashells - it really is endless.

Pulls are a little more basic, but even here you can choose from square styles, rounded pulls, swirled handles.

Some of the local hardware stores on the East End have a surprisingly wide array of kitchen hardware in terms of style and price point, from the most basic to more high end. The True Value hardware store in Watermill is redoing a portion of the space to include a wider array of decorative hardware. (The owner of that store also owns Simons Hardware in the city.) Emporium Hardware (also a True Value) in Sag Harbor has a really interesting, surprisingly wide selection as well.

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