Hardware as Architecture
From Seattle workshops to the desert hills, the TK Collection proves that modernism lives on — down to the smallest handle in a Palm Springs home.
The TK Collection treats hardware the way modernists treated buildings: as structure stripped to its essence. These aren’t knobs and pulls as accessories — they’re levers, plates, and handles that extend the logic of the door, the cabinet, the wall.
That such work comes out of Seattle — a city of shipyards, rain, and industrial grit — is fitting. The hardware feels forged from the same honesty that built ferries, cranes, and aircraft. And yet, placed in Palm Springs, it carries the lineage of desert modernism forward.
Neutra demanded precision down to the hinge. Cody celebrated restraint so the architecture could breathe. Frey made even a cabinet pull part of his philosophy of living lightly in the desert. Kaptur elevated craft until every joint felt deliberate. Each of them would recognize TK’s clarity.
The welded tube pulls, with grips in leather, walnut, or rubber, feel inevitable: steel for strength, leather for touch, wood for warmth, rubber for grip. No disguises. No plating. No flourish. Hardware as structure, not ornament.
The sliding door pulls — folded plate with hemmed edges — echo the Palm Springs ideal. A single sheet bent into usefulness. Neutra would have admired the efficiency. Cody the scale. Frey the hand feel. Kaptur the craft.
Cabinet pulls continue the logic. The “Ear” and “Earless” models are nothing more than sheet metal folded into a hemmed grip. The “Peel” handle is a plate bent outward, a gesture so simple it could have come from a carpenter’s workshop in 1925. What unites them is restraint: each form is obvious once you see it, but invisible until someone thinks to make it.
Even the furnishings, pressed from hot-rolled plate with tool marks intact, recall the desert masters. They feel kin to the concrete boulders at Frey House II or the stone walls at Edris House. Nothing polished away. Nothing unnecessary.
In an age where hardware is often marketed as jewelry — shiny, plated, ornamental — the TK Collection does the opposite. It insists hardware is not an accessory but an extension of the architecture itself. You don’t choose it to decorate; you choose it to complete the logic of a door, a drawer, a desk.
Form follows function. Truth of material is the only ornament.