Doors have been considered symbolic portals for millennia: thresholds through which lies the unknown, where one condition gives way to another. And if you’ve ever walked into a room and immediately forgotten why, this in-between state might sound familiar. The door is never just an opening. it is an arrival, a pause, a decision, a passage. However, the material that mediates this moment is still too often treated as an architectural thought, slowly defined and noticed only when it fails.
Bankston has built her practice around a different premise. The Australian architectural hardware brand understands that the first thing people usually do when entering a space is reach for a handle. Before the eye fully absorbs the room, before the body crosses the threshold, the hand has already begun to read: texture, temperature, weight, resistance, proportion. Our brains are trained to gather information from these small senses wherever we go. Delineating this experience is both the pressure and privilege of design. If we want to interact with something every day, it needs to feel both considered and functional.
This idea formed his basis A manifesto in touchBankston’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 materials not as accessories to interiors, but as one of the most intimate ways we encounter them.
Central to the installation was the Touch Manifesto, a written challenge by FOR SCALE editor, critic and founder David Michon that reframed touch as a form of intelligence. “TOUCH ME is not what the handle asks for,” the manifesto argued, “it’s how it performs.” Printed on walls and hand-painted on mirrors, his language surrounded visitors with a reminder that feeling is not secondary to design, but one of the most essential ways to communicate. In a culture increasingly mediated by screens, the exhibition spoke of physical contact as something fundamental, intimate and urgently human.
The setting made the argument palpable. Visitors encountered hand-drawn photography, manifesto excerpts, and a series of custom interventions that invited them to grab, pull, step, sit, and linger. Stools and tables made by Caleb Engstrom were outfitted with pieces from Bankston’s collaborative collections, including Super by Sans-Arc Studio and The Streaks by YSG Studio. Mirrors featuring CIVILIAN’s Hemispheres collection featured 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 approaching handles, pulls, hooks and knobs as standard finishing details, the brand treats them as small-scale design objects with architectural implications. Created with Melbourne-based Edition Office, Casts uses traditional sandblasting techniques to explore materiality, tactility and form through raw bronze and aluminium. Its expressive geometries and textured surfaces allow the 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.
Created with Brooklyn-based CIVILIAN, Hemispheres marked Bankston’s US debut and presented a modular 12-piece collection that combined architectural precision with artistic influences from South Australia and Brooklyn. Crafted with materials including American walnut, Potoro Gold marble, polished chrome, polished nickel and bone, the collection underscored the brand’s commitment to global collaboration and tactile refinement.
Then there’s The Streaks, Bankston’s collaboration with Sydney-based YSG Studio and founder Yasmine Ghoniem. First unveiled during Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign, the sculptural collection brings wooden and copper doorknobs, pulls and joinery pieces into lively dialogue through bold striped bands, sustainably sourced materials and handcrafted Australian production. The result is a material that looks like a contrast: ergonomic yet expressive, playful yet precise, functional yet undeniably decorative. It celebrates the contribution of materiality not as superficial embellishment, but as the very thing that turns a basic point of contact into a moment of encounter.
At Colbo, these objects were not isolated on plinths or distanced behind a logical looking gallery. They were embedded in a functional, social environment where the body could understand them. Visitors spilled out onto the street with wine and vermouth in hand. inside, the room became part of exhibition, part of discussion, part of argument about the objects we mindlessly strive for. Even the printed manifesto became interactive, with visitors invited to tear strips from the poster: a tear as a kind of pull, a pull as a kind of grip, a grip as a gesture that breaks down the distance between viewer and object.
This is where Bankston’s work has particular resonance. Elevated material design isn’t just about making small objects prettier, though Bankston does that with great 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 wood, or the subtle irregularity of a cast surface. A door opens. A body enters. The ritual is short, but 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 forefront of a more expressive hardware movement, understanding grips 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 miniature ritual and the door handle becomes something closer to art.
To learn more about the two places and their shared ethos, visit bankston.com and forscale.substack.com.
Photo courtesy of Bankston.
