If you have some DIY to do this weekend, you might want to ditch your trusty tools in favour of something a little more ostentatious.
Thanks to an offer from Stanley Tools, you can now get your hands on some luxury hardware - a 22-carat gold hammer no less.
This particular promotion is running right here in the UAE with all customers who spend Dh100 on Stanley products entered for a raffle. Apart from the grand prize of a 255-gram gold hammer, customers can also win 25 gold coins of 8 grams in weight. But if you are interested you had better hurry: the promotion ends tomorrow.
On another note, however, if you happen to be looking for the ultimate in architectural hardware then you will have to look across the pond to ER Butler & Co, a premium custom hardware manufacturer based in New York.
Again prepare to have your assumptions challenged: a hinge does not just hold a door in place; a knob does not just open a door. No item is too small to have its "stature elevated within the decorative arts" be it a mount, fastener or thumb turn. Hinges, for example, come in numerous varieties including Louis XIV Regency, Classical, Renaissance Baroque, Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Do people really care? Yes, according to Rhett Butler, the firm's owner. "Everything's so homogenised these days," he recently told Bloomberg News. "People want something special."
For one client, Mr Butler melted down gold bullion into door handles. This allowed the client to hide his wealth in plain sight. "Who's going to steal the hardware out of a house?" Bloomberg reported him as saying.
The firm has also made door handles out of coral, resins, pearl, mother-of-pearl and "pretty much every semiprecious stone that's out there."
For the doorknobs in singer Lenny Kravitz's New York flat, the firm came up with the idea of ermine.
