Lanserring makes bespoke kitchens at the very top of the market. We make bespoke knives. When they approached us about a set of four, the conversation was not really about knives at all. It was about what it takes to design and make something to one client’s exact room, which is a problem both of us spend our working lives solving.
We worked with their chief designer, and the whole thing came down to detail. The knives are full tang, but built in the Japanese wa-handle style with the pins hidden. The handles are weighted towards a warm hardwood and capped at the front with African blackwood, joined by a small brass bow-tie inlay that runs across the pair. Because the two knives mirror each other, the inlay had to mirror too, which is as fiddly to make as it sounds.
The harder problem was the finish. Lanserring wanted gold, and gold means PVD, a vapour coating normally applied at three to four hundred degrees. That is hot enough to undo a knife’s temper and leave a beautiful, soft blade. So we developed a process that lays the coating down at around a hundred and fifty degrees, well below the point where the steel begins to lose what we have built into it.
The result is a muted champagne gold rather than a bright one, which is the right note for the kind of kitchen these belong in. Lightly engraved along each blade is a contour map of the land around Lanserring’s workshop in Austria, beneath Riegersburg Castle.
What Lanserring made possible was the discipline of designing to someone else’s room, and a finish we would not have had reason to solve on our own.
In collaboration with Lanserring.