Kitchen Fittings & Unicorn Rainbows Can Be Expensive

I don’t want to boast, but most kitchens go to pieces in my presence. I’m a bit like the Beatles that way. (Or, for the younger crowd, Justine Bieber, whoever she is.) They end up in bits. Not emotionally, you understand. Physically. I go in and within a day the doors and handles are off.

You look alarmed.

Don’t worry. It’s all part of the process. And I put it all back together again when I’m done. So far, I have never ended up with a spare handle, knob or screw that I couldn’t account for.

That’s just as well, because some kitchen fittings are expensive. Really expensive. Practically second-mortgage expensive. You’d almost feel you have to put on cotton gloves just to open a drawer. And when you do, you expect a burst of classical music and rays of unicorn rainbows to shine out. (I have it from my daughter that unicorn rainbows are a thing and if I really loved her, I’d get her her own unicorn for Christmas, which she wants to keep in her room and feed unicorn floss.) Anyway, what I’m trying to say is these fittings are a luxurious experience for your fingers. You keep wanting to open and close kitchen cabinets and drawers.

I recently painted a fabulous kitchen in Wexford with fittings from Armac Martin, which you’d think is a fine brandy distillery in France but is in fact a fine brassworks company in the UK. They make things like burnished brass bun knobs. (Say that quickly ten times, I challenge you.) And you can’t just roll up at your local DIY shop and pluck a packet off the peg. Oh, no. They are rarer than Festool dust extractors (see my previous post). Each Armac Martin product is made to order and takes six weeks to deliver.

It goes without saying I paint kitchen doors and drawers with the fittings off. Always. In case you thought I tried to leave them on and attempt to paint round the edges. I’ve seen it done. It never ends well. That kind of lazy shoddiness puts me in a bad mood when I see it.

The right fittings in a kitchen can make a huge difference. Not just in how it feels to open and close doors and drawers, but how the kitchen hangs together visually too. I have seen kitchens lose some of their magic after new fittings were installed. A tiny detail, perhaps, but significant nevertheless. A bit like finding a fly floating in your tea.

he fittings in this particular kitchen were made with an satin nickle finish, which stands out beautifully against the finish of the paint.

I often ask clients whether I can take pictures of the kitchen when the painting is done. In this instance, I have to admit, it was more to do with the fittings than pride in my own work. It’s a bit like when people take a selfie with a celebrity. Celebrity means nothing to me—unless, of course, the celebrity in question has held a rugby ball in anger for Wales, in which case they are a god rather than a mere celebrity. But introduce me to a set of finest quality kitchen drawer and cabinet fittings and I go giggly weak at the knees like a little girl.

For Christmas, I’d love to give myself a set of Armac Martin cabinet fittings I can keep in my workshop to admire. I could polish them with the mane hair of a floss-fed rainbow unicorn. But to be honest with you, the unicorn is going to cost enough already, so I’ll probably end up just getting one of those.

An Armac Martin Cotswold cupboard catch with a satin nickel finish in my client’s kitchen