The Medina Workshop
The souk of Marrakech has been a centre of metalworking for over a thousand years. In the narrow lanes of the medina, workshops open directly onto the street — the sound of hammering brass audible from fifty metres away, the smell of hot metal and coal smoke mixing with the spices from the market stalls nearby. It is one of the few places in the world where you can still watch a craftsman make a finished object from raw material using techniques that have not fundamentally changed since the medieval period.
Our atelier sits within this tradition. The master craftsmen who make Northgrove fixtures learned their trade from their fathers, who learned from their fathers before them. The knowledge of how to read the metal — how hard to strike, when to reheat, how to judge the temper of the brass by its colour in the forge — is embodied knowledge, passed through demonstration and practice over years of apprenticeship, not through manuals or machines.
The Process: From Ingot to Fixture
Every Northgrove piece begins as a solid brass ingot — an alloy of approximately 70% copper and 30% zinc, chosen for its workability, its warm colour, and its long-term durability. The ingot is heated in a coal forge until it reaches the correct working temperature, identifiable by its colour: a deep orange-red that signals the metal is soft enough to shape without cracking.
The craftsman then works the metal on an anvil, using a series of hammers of different weights and face profiles to gradually form the shape. For a faucet body, this process may take several hours of repeated heating and hammering, each pass refining the form a little further. For a mirror frame, the brass sheet is worked over a form, the craftsman using a combination of hammering and hand-pressure to achieve the precise curves of the design.
The surface texture that results from this process — the slight irregularity, the subtle variations in thickness, the faint hammer marks that catch the light — is not a flaw. It is the signature of the human hand, the evidence that a real person made this object. No two pieces are identical, because no two hammer strikes are identical.
The Finishing
After the primary shaping is complete, the piece is filed and sanded to remove any sharp edges and to refine the surface. For pieces that will be left unlacquered, this is where the surface preparation ends — the metal is cleaned, inspected, and packaged. For pieces that will receive a patinated finish (such as our aged copper range), the craftsman applies a chemical patination process, carefully controlling the depth and evenness of the colour before sealing it with a light wax.
The final quality check is done by hand and eye. The craftsman runs their fingers over every surface, feeling for any irregularities that the eye might miss. Pieces that do not meet the standard are returned for rework. This is not a statistical process — there is no acceptable defect rate. Every piece that leaves the atelier must be right.
Why Handcrafting Matters
In a world of die-cast zinc hardware finished with a thin electroplated coating, the question of why handcrafted solid brass matters is worth answering directly. The practical answer is durability: a solid brass piece will outlast a plated piece by decades, because there is no coating to chip, peel, or wear through. The aesthetic answer is character: the slight variations of handwork give a piece a presence that machine-made objects simply do not have. And the philosophical answer is value: an object made by a skilled human being, using techniques refined over generations, carries a different kind of meaning than one stamped out of a mould.
When you install a Northgrove fixture, you are not just buying hardware. You are participating in a tradition of craft that connects your home to the workshops of Marrakech, to the generations of craftsmen who developed these techniques, and to the long history of brass as a material of beauty and utility in human civilisation.