Why we leave brass unlacquered
Craft
Lacquer buys two good years and then fails exactly where the hand lands. The alternative asks for no maintenance at all.
Lacquer is a thin plastic film sprayed over brass to stop it doing the one thing brass is good at. It works for about two years. Then it wears through where hands land, the metal tarnishes in those patches and nowhere else, and the handle ends up looking dirty rather than old. Taking it back off is a workshop job on every piece in the house.
Left bare, brass tarnishes everywhere at once and unevenly where it is touched, which is a different proposition entirely. High points stay bright because skin polishes them daily. Recesses go brown. Within a year the object carries a legible record of how it is used, and nobody has had to maintain anything for that to happen.
What is actually going on
The chemistry is dull and worth knowing. Brass is copper and zinc. The copper reacts with oxygen, moisture and the sulphur compounds in ordinary air, and forms a thin oxide layer. That layer is stable, it stops at a certain depth, and it protects the metal underneath. It is not corrosion in any sense that should worry a client, and it will not eat a handle.
Speed depends on the air. In a Lisbon apartment three streets from the river a new lever turns within about six weeks. Inland at Quinta do Vale, an hour east of Évora, the same lever took a full season. Kitchens run fastest of all, because of steam, salt, and hands that are never quite dry.
Where it belongs, and where it does not
We put brass wherever a hand goes. Levers, pulls, hinges, tap bodies, the collar on a light fitting. At Hôtel du Passage there is one brass floor lamp in each of the 31 rooms, and after a winter of guests no two of them are the same colour. That is the whole argument in a single photograph, and it is why the fittings there were designed before the rooms were.
It is wrong in three places. Anywhere it stands in water, so never on a shower valve. Anywhere it will be scrubbed with an abrasive cream, because the pattern of the scrubbing becomes the pattern of the finish. And on any handle a client has told us they intend to polish, because they will polish it for six months and then stop, and a half polished handle is worse than either extreme. Salt air is its own case, and on a coast we specify bronze instead, which goes dark and stays there.
The handover advice is one word long. Nothing. If a particular door plate becomes unbearable, half a lemon and a minute of rubbing takes it back to new, and it will be brown again before the season is out.