Caring for Solid Bronze

Bronze is one of the few materials sold on the promise that it will change. Buy it expecting it to stay as it arrived, and the ordinary process of ageing will look like something going wrong. It isn't.

The first rule is to wash it by hand. Dishwashers combine heat, detergent and prolonged moisture in a way that strips the surface unevenly and can pit solid bronze over time - a fast way to undo years of the patina it's meant to build. A wash in warm water with a mild detergent, dried straight after, is all it needs.

Dry it properly, and don't let it sit wet. Bronze reacts to prolonged moisture, and left damp - especially in contact with something acidic like lemon, vinegar or tomato - it will tarnish faster and less evenly than if it's simply dried and put away.

Expect the colour to change, because that's the material working as intended. Siam Bronze Factory's drink buckets, hand-cast in their Bangkok workshop since 1954, are designed around exactly this - each piece develops a natural patina with use, slowly and differently from every other piece, in direct proportion to how often it comes to the table. That variation isn't a flaw to manage. It's the reason to own something in solid bronze rather than stainless.

If you do want to bring a piece back to brightness, a soft cloth with a little lemon and salt, or a proper metal polish, will do it - but sparingly, and not as routine. Polished back to a mirror shine every week, bronze never gets the chance to develop the record of use that's the entire point of choosing it.

Store pieces dry, away from rubber bands and newspaper, both of which can react with the metal and mark the surface.

Shop our Siam Bronze Factory pieces, hand-cast in Bangkok since 1954.