We had a seemingly impossible task at hand! See why!
A beautiful waterfront estate in Maryland was undergoing a major upgrade. There had been 2 porches facing the water, on the north side and south sides of the house. The original screens were tattered, the frames were deformed, and numerous places had been patched together with bolts and screws. The question to us was “Can you recreate a bronze screen system that still looks authentic?”
The old screens had been installed decades ago, and both the frames and all the screens had been done in an original bronze material. These frames and screens were installed in an original method with mechanical fasteners in a bronze/ copper material. This made the replication process incredibly challenging, but we are up for a challenge to make a client’s dream come true!
We pulled from our knowledge of building wrought iron railings and incorporating bronze cap railing and submitted a proposal. The clients had some feedback. It was “could the frame be narrower as opposed to rectangular to minimize the impeding views of the bay. The other piece of feedback they gave was “could you come up with a way of attaching the screen/framework in an authentic way that it was not an eyesore?”
Our solution was to make the framework square, which kept relatively the same strength, but lessened the visual perspective. The other solution was to increase the size of the internal screen bar to allow for blind tapped holes, and not have any type of fastener protrude from the framework.
The fabrication of these custom bronze screens was extremely labor intensive and took months to build. Once complete, we used an old method to patina all the bronze work to give it a copperish patina. This provides the visual illusion that the project would have been built 100 years ago.
So, these renovated screens looked authentic and are ready for the next century of screened protection for this Maryland estate.
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