Doors have been considered symbolic portals for millennia: thresholds through which the unknown lies, where one condition gives way to another. And if you’ve ever walked into a room and immediately forgotten why, that charged in-between state might feel familiar. The door is never just an opening; it is an arrival, a pause, a decision, a passage. Yet the hardware that mediates that moment is still too often treated as an architectural afterthought, specified late and noticed only when it fails.
Bankston has built its practice around a different premise. The Australian architectural hardware brand understands that the first thing one usually does when entering a space is reach for a handle. Before the eye has fully absorbed the room, before the body has crossed the threshold, the hand has already begun reading: texture, temperature, weight, resistance, proportion. Our brains are trained to gather information from these small sensations wherever we go. Delineating that experience is both the pressure and privilege of design. If we are to interact with something every day, it should feel as considered as it functions.
That idea formed the basis of A Manifesto on Touch, Bankston’s NYCxDESIGN Week presentation created in collaboration with independent design platform FOR SCALE. On May 13, Bankston and FOR SCALE took over Colbo wine bar on New York’s Lower East Side for an immersive evening that positioned architectural hardware not as an accessory to interiors, but as one of the most intimate ways we encounter them.
Central to the installation was the Touch Manifesto, a written provocation by editor, critic, and FOR SCALE founder David Michon, which reframed touch as a form of intelligence. “TOUCH ME is not what the handle begs,” the manifesto asserted, “it is how it performs.” Printed across the walls and hand-painted onto mirrors, its language surrounded guests with a reminder that sensation is not secondary to design, but one of its most essential modes of communication. In a culture increasingly mediated by screens, the exhibition made the case for physical contact as something grounding, intimate, and urgently human.
The setting made the argument tangible. Guests encountered hand photography, manifesto excerpts, and a series of custom interventions that invited them to grip, pull, press, sit, and linger. Stools and tables fabricated by Caleb Engstrom were fitted with pieces from Bankston’s collaborative collections, including Super by Sans-Arc Studio and The Streaks by YSG Studio. Mirrors edged with CIVILIAN’s Hemispheres collection carried hand-painted manifesto quotes, while works from Casts by Edition Office appeared throughout the space, expanding the installation’s material and formal vocabulary.
Taken together, the collections suggested the breadth of Bankston’s ambitions. Rather than approach handles, pulls, hooks, and knobs as standardized finishing details, the brand treats them as small-scale design objects with architectural consequence. Casts, created with Melbourne-based Edition Office, uses traditional sandcasting techniques to explore materiality, tactility, and form through raw bronze and aluminum. Its expressive geometries and textured surfaces allow patina to become part of the object’s evolving relationship with the person who uses it. Super, Bankston’s collaboration with Sans-Arc Studio, channels the visual exuberance of the 1960s Radical Design Movement through playful levers, pulls, and knobs that bring irreverence to the everyday.
Hemispheres, created with Brooklyn-based CIVILIAN, marked Bankston’s U.S. debut and introduced a modular 12-piece collection that combined architectural precision with artistic influences drawn from South Australia and Brooklyn. Crafted in materials including American walnut, Potoro Gold marble, polished chrome, smooth nickel, and bone, the collection underscored the brand’s commitment to globally inflected collaboration and tactile refinement.
Then there is The Streaks, Bankston’s collaboration with Sydney-based YSG Studio and founder Yasmine Ghoniem. Originally unveiled during Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign, the sculptural collection brings timber and bronze door levers, pulls, and joinery pieces into vivid dialogue through bold striped banding, sustainably sourced materials, and handcrafted Australian production. The result is hardware that feels animated by contrast: ergonomic yet expressive, playful yet precise, functional yet undeniably decorative. It celebrates the confluence of materiality not as surface embellishment, but as the very thing that turns a basic touch point into a moment of encounter.
At Colbo, those objects were not isolated on plinths or distanced behind a gallery logic of looking. They were embedded into a functioning, social environment where the body could understand them. Guests spilled onto the street with wine and vermouth spritzes in hand; inside, the room became part exhibition, part conversation, part argument for the objects we reach for without thinking. Even the printed manifesto became interactive, with visitors invited to tear strips from the poster: a rip as a kind of pull, a pull as a kind of handle, a handle as a gesture that collapses the distance between viewer and object.
This is where Bankston’s work feels especially resonant. Elevated hardware design is not simply about making small objects more beautiful, though Bankston does that with considerable finesse. It is about recognizing that the smallest architectural movements often carry the greatest intimacy. A hand closes around a lever. A thumb meets a groove. A palm registers cool metal, warm timber, or the subtle irregularity of a cast surface. A door opens. A body enters. The ritual is brief, but it is not insignificant.
With A Manifesto on Touch, Bankston made visible what design too often overlooks: that the built environment is not only seen, but constantly felt. Through collaborations with YSG Studio, Edition Office, Sans-Arc Studio, and CIVILIAN, the brand has placed itself at the front of a more expressive hardware movement, one that understands handles and pulls as instruments of atmosphere. These are the pieces that sit between architecture and the body, between intention and action, between one room and the next. In Bankston’s hands, even the simplest movement becomes a tiny ritual, and the door handle becomes something closer to art.
To learn more about both parties and their shared ethos, visit bankston.com and forscale.substack.com.
Photography courtesy of Bankston.
