Showroom

Nanz Company

By appointment

Custom hardware made at a Long Island factory, over 3,000 products including handles, hinges, locks, and latches.

Nanz makes door and cabinet hardware and has done since Steve Nanz and Carl Sorenson started at 144 Bowery in 1989. The Varick Street showroom is the New York face of a factory at Deer Park on Long Island, which is where the work is actually done.

The catalogue runs past three thousand items across handles, hinges, locks and latches, but the reason architects come is what happens when the catalogue does not have it. A backplate drawn to an odd door width, a lever scaled to an oversized leaf, a finish matched to something already in the building: those are factory jobs here rather than sourcing problems.

The showroom is by appointment and it is on the tenth floor. That is a working arrangement rather than a formality, because hardware is chosen by handling it and a visit is spent taking samples off boards and trying them.

Finish is the specification that causes trouble later. Unlacquered brass moves, and it moves faster on a door that is used than on one that is not, so a house specified in one finish will not read as one finish after a year. That is a decision to make deliberately at the outset rather than a defect to discover.

Hardware is the part of a building touched every day and it is usually specified last, out of whatever a supplier stocks. A factory that will make one lever to a drawing inverts that order, and the argument for the trip is that it makes the ironmongery a design decision rather than a procurement one.