Every commission starts on paper, long before a single bar is heated.

We spend a morning in the space with you, measuring openings, watching how light crosses the wall and marking each point a hand will actually touch. Those notes decide the stock, the joinery and the finish.

You leave that session holding dimensioned drawings and a bill of material you can price against, so nothing about the finished piece arrives as a surprise on install day.

The wrong stock fails quietly, years later.

Mild steel, wrought iron, bronze and stainless each move differently under the hammer and age differently once they sit outdoors. A handrail beside salt air wants nothing to do with the grade we would pick for an interior stair. So we match section and alloy to where the piece will live, then weather a test offcut through a full season before committing to it.

It is a slower way to begin a job. It is also why our older commissions still read the way they did on the day they went up, rather than as something waiting to be stripped back.