Brass and Decorative Ironwork. The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Moscow

The wrought-iron balustrades were made with square carbon steel rods sized 14mm in the cross-section. These rods, furnace-heated to a red hot condition, were bent into one of the two shapes we had agreed to call “stadiums” and “rings” for easier reference. The “stadiums” and the “rings” were then joined in the balustrade between the string capping and the baluster base.

The “stadiums” were welded to the baluster base at the bottom, and fixed to the string capping with steel spheres at the top. The spheres were drilled through, but the finer part was that the apertures were drilled at a specified mutual angle. This was exceedingly hard work. It’s one thing to drill through. Drilling at an inward angle is something that is rarely, if ever, done.

Installation of the polished brass handrails was hard, painstaking work. For starters, the architect had designed the brass handrail in an intricate, double-beveled shape with a curved top. The handrail was 30mm thick and 60mm wide. It looked massive and regal.

The extrusion method was employed in the manufacturing of the brass handrails. The injection mold was designed to allow for some empty space to remain inside the handrail post-extrusion, in order to lighten its weight without changing its look.

The extrusion mold was tested and it broke, unable to withstand the pressure. The reinforced replacement mold we made would last us through the entire extrusion process.

Each of the 160 brass turns on the handrails was manufactured and fitted manually. There were both horizontal and vertical turns on the balustrade for the brass handrail to follow. The turns had to be smooth, but no plain horizontal surfaces were allowed. Carbon steel templates for handrail turns were manufactured onsite and taken back to the workshop, where two Brass Workshop masters, activating a proprietary brass heating process, bent the blanks according to the template turns. The brass turns were then taken back to the site at The Residences at MANDARIN ORIENTAL, where they were fitted into place, and if they fit, returned to the workshop for polishing and patina finishing.

The handrail turns were so touch-and-go and so much work that only our top metalwork masters were up to the challenge. The daily output per one staff member never exceeded 5 turn parts.

This project took our team 16 months of hard, painstaking work.

The gap in the joints where the straight and curved handrail sections meet never exceeds 0.5mm. Each curve is positively a work of art and a showpiece of accomplished mastery.