Decorative brass marquetry screens for Carré Blanc
Decorative brass marquetry screens for Carré Blanc by design ara DESIGN, London https://www.aradesign.co.uk/ brass marquetry screens for the decoration of the elevator portals. Since every square centimeter of space at Carré Blanc Apartments https://carreblanc.moscow/is about art and esthetic education, the design of the elevator portals had to be perfect down to every square centimeter. Being part of the overall harmony, it had to be in the same league by quality, style, and workmanship. The combination of the patinated https://metalworkshop.art/surfaces/peltrox-tarlato-1-11/brashed brass and brashed brass in real colors https://metalworkshop.art/surfaces/peltrox-tarlato-1-3/
Every new project puts our team’s professionalism to a test, challenging our attention to detail, our sense of good taste and style, and our mental and tactile feel for harmony. And every new success story is a milestone we clear as we grow and get better at what we do. We never rest on the laurels but keep moving, always striving forward and upward. It hardly even matters in what format we deliver our best work to the customer, whether we design the object ourselves or follow preapproved specifications. Our project for Carré Blanc Apartments is a case in point.
The interior designs at Carré Blanc Apartments highlight the true meaning of luxury (defined as “very wealthy and comfortable surroundings” on Wikipedia). Designed by the best in the field, these spaces are incredibly subtle, vibrant, and they naturally weld traditional forms with innovative ideas, expensive simplicity with ultimate comfort and a sense of perfect safety and exclusion. The result is a harmonious interior design calibrated to achieve the ultimate precision of all metrics, whichever angle you observe it from. “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury”, said the great Coco Chanel https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C,_%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE. I’m sure she would say it again, were she to gaze upon this splendor. Every mirror in this unbelievably beautiful ambience reflects a stunning, easy and natural unity of all elements, both decorative and functional.
Carré Blanc is more than just a perfect place to live, the private paradise of apartment and penthouse homeowners. It’s a portal into the world of art. The Carré Blanc crack team of concierge clerks – the veritable doorkeepers of art – are there to curate the exclusive in-house art collection and library and MC invitation-only events. Judging by the furnishings and décor in the Lobby, you’d assume that the people hand-picked to work in this exclusive, refined place are art historians, no less, complete with impeccable credentials and a track record working for Christie’s https://www.christies.com/en or Sotheby’s.
Carré Blanc is an aristocratic club house that’s art territory through and through, from façade and patio to air molecules in the lobby. It is for the interior decoration of this distinguished space that Metalworkshop crafted a number of décor pieces of unparalleled elegance and workmanship, which were like icing on a cake for this ambience and fully in keeping with its uncompromisingly high standards.
Light and color, line and form, stone and wood all speak of beauty, elegance, class and luxury in their own language. We have enriched this chorus by adding the voice of metal. We’ve learned to hear the breathing of metal with our heart and feel it with our fingertips. To us, this project is like an exhibit showcase or an exclusive invitation to make a bold statement of excellence on an equal footing with our customers and partners – world-class professionals in their respective fields. Underpinned by tried and true savoir faire, our products exemplify some of the finest accomplishments in the art of blacksmithing.
One of our jobs was to manufacture a number of beautiful П-shaped brass marquetry screens for the decoration of the elevator portals. Since every square centimeter of space at Carré Blanc Apartmentshttps://carreblanc.moscow/ is about art and esthetic education, the design of the elevator portals had to be perfect down to every square centimeter. Being part of the overall harmony, it had to be in the same league by quality, style, and workmanship.
Every square inch of the exquisite openwork of these brass marquetry screens is a result of hard, painstaking manual work of Metalworkshop masters. The monumental challenge that faced our team was to perform a huge amount of manual work with zero tolerance for error. Mistakes were out of the question. This meant that all the elements – the elevator portals, inspection hatches, and doors – had to be manufactured, as it were, in the same breath. At the same time, all process phases had to be followed to a T, and all the nuances that only reveal themselves to the hands of a true master had to be heeded.
Each brass marquetry screen was designed as a structure so complex as to very nearly defy human capability. If anyone could make them, it would be Metalworkshop masters. The core part in every screen is a 5mm brass bar with a square cross-section. There are two layers of these bars, each with its own ornament, like a double mesh. One layer has the bars placed diagonally, the other has them strictly at right angles. The slots in the brass bars had to be precision-machined to match the specified sizes. The screens look so light, ethereal and weightless it is difficult to fathom how much work went into them, how much manual skill and ingenuity Metalworkshop craftsmen had to summon to complete the job.
It is difficult to imagine how complex and sophisticated the manufacturing process is for these artifacts. Using a manual milling machine, one had to mill the tiny pins and slots in the brass bar exactly to specifications, and then drill 5mm apertures with great precision for the joining of the layers. The two conjoined layers of a brass marquetry screen for the elevator portal (same as the inspection hatches and doors) had to form an integral whole both visually and technologically. Metalworkshop specialists would put the screen together by joining the two layers in a geometrically correct pattern, making sure every pin went into the right slot, and then installed the studs. It was hard, painstaking manual work where every operation required extraordinary skill, expertise, precision, and colossal stress-resilience. It is pertinent to note that even the hardest-working, most accomplished master of the craft would not be able to manufacture more than 1 square meter of this screen in one day. And because the screens were double-layered, our team had to work with double productivity while carefully following the prescribed sequence of operations and processes and steering clear of any error or imprecision, no matter how tiny. When the milling machine operator makes a mistake, the geometry will be out of whack, with the ornament askew. When the fitter makes a mistake, constructional irregularities will also ensue. Every specialist is, therefore, under tremendous pressure to use his expert touch and practiced eye to the max. Once the screen is in one piece, it has to be ground in a specified grain direction. Then the product gets an anti-oxidant coat to protect it from the elements. This is followed by final assembly of the product.
Our next job on this project was to put together a supplementary assembly of brass bars with a 12mm square cross-section. After this, all the conjoined screens were additionally fastened together with large sections, which served to conceal the mechanical joints between the screen leaves.
To manufacture 80.5 square meters of brass marquetry screens, we machined nearly 150,000 slots 2.5mm deep and 5mm across, manually drilled 151,000 apertures 2mm in diameter, and hand-installed 28,000 studs.
The challenges of manufacturing these brass screens became more numerous when the architects requested inspection hatches and doors for elevator servicing, which would also serve the additional purpose of masking certain utility apertures. Moreover, the lift control units, fire safety switches, and electrical distribution boxes had to be concealed behind two or three screen layers.
Our specialists were furthermore asked to manufacture some custom-designed connecting hinges that would match the screen’s ornament, size, and alignment.
Every piece our team manufactured for this project required an incredible amount of painstaking manual work.
Metalworkshop masters executed the marquetry ornament on the brass screens of the elevator portals, complete with inspection hatches and doors, in an elegant and artful way, so that the leaves of the screens ended up looking perfectly natural and integral, as if crocheted from metal yarn. The final product was more than merely a decorated functional piece; it was a picture of wondrously delicate workmanship, consisting of geometrically ideal metal snowflakes bound into a single ornament. In the lobby, these laced ornaments, like geometrized cobwebs, took their designated places on all the walls, blending in both functionally and decoratively, as parts of the designer’s vision. Casting one last look across the space of the Carré Blanc lobby, we feel fully justified in reporting that each screen large and small, each leaf, and each item crafted by Metalworkshop takes pride of place here, both as an organic component of the overall design concept, and as a work of art in its own right.
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