How a column is made.

The steel arrives in six-metre bars, laser marked at source with diameter, wall thickness, heat number, batch and exact production date. Every tube is inspected on arrival.

It means that for every column leaving here we know which heat it came from. This is not paperwork: it is what makes it possible, years later, to trace a piece back to its origin.

The bars are cut exactly in half: three metres, the developed length of the tallest models. No offcuts, nothing left unusable.

On the Twiggy series the cut is set at thirty degrees, made while the tube is still straight. At that point in the process it looks like a mistake. It compensates for the way the metal shifts during bending, so that the head of the column ends up perfectly parallel to the ground.

Cold bending a tube with a wall thicker than three millimetres without crushing it takes a part no customer will ever see: a moving mandrel in bronze and aluminium alloy that goes inside the tube and holds the section round while the bending machine works.

The mandrel alone is not enough. The elasticity of steel changes imperceptibly from one heat to the next, and two tubes with the same specification react slightly differently. At the start of every batch the bend angle is recalibrated by hand: bend, measure, correct.

The internal bodies and mechanical parts are AISI 316 stainless steel as well, milled from solid on CNC machining centres. It is a difference you cannot see and that almost nobody makes: where the industry uses brass, here there is the same steel as on the outside.

Milling from solid instead of assembling means fewer joints, and every joint saved is one less place where something can give way.

The external structures are consolidated with TIG welding. It is the slowest method available and it is the one that holds on the largest structures.

This is the stage the customer never sees and the one that decides everything else.

Raw steel has a natural porosity: microscopic openings where corrosion can take hold. The surface is polished with abrasive papers of increasing grit, then with flap brush machines and cotton wheels, which close the pores for good.

Only then can the chromium oxide layer, the one that makes steel stainless, wrap the whole surface without leaving weak points. A mirror finish is not a flourish: it is the sign that nothing underneath has been left open.

This is where the column takes on its skin: mirror, brushed, painted and PVD. There are seven finishes in the catalogue. Colour is another matter: it has no number, because painting has no limits. RAL, Pantone or NCS, even on a single piece.

Painted parts dry naturally, at room temperature, for two weeks. That is two of the five we quote as production time.

An oven would do the same job in under an hour, but it would harden the paint and make it rigid. An outdoor column goes from minus twenty degrees in winter to over sixty on a surface in full sun, and with every cycle the steel expands. A rigid paint cracks sooner or later. A slowly dried paint stays elastic and follows the metal.

Two weeks of waiting against ten years of durability.

Inside, the plumbing is fitted, with every connection working to millimetric tolerances. The handles receive the Fontealta laser marking, which authenticates the piece. Every column is hydraulically tested before it leaves.

The last step is a soft non-woven bag, then shock-proof packing: because the riskiest part of the journey, for a mirror polished and painted piece, is often the last one.