Dutch designer Ward Wijnant has created a bench made from different kinds of steel, which are welded together to mimic wood grain and oxidised to reveal their "crazy, hidden colours".
The Carbon bench, which was designed to push the aesthetic and textural possibilities of steel, has an iridescent blue and pale yellow finish that doesn't stem from paint or lacquer but from the chemical reaction set off by the firing process.
Wijnant fires the steel until it turns blue while the stainless steel turns a pale yellow
To create the product, Wijnant welds a pattern of raised stainless steel welts onto thick slabs of regular steel and vice versa.
These building blocks are then combined to form the bench, which has a more or less uniform colour when the steel is first welded together. But once it goes into the oven to be tempered, the two kinds of steel respond in different ways. The bench has a surface texture that was designed to resemble wood grain
As the slabs heat up, a film of iron oxide forms on their surface in a process known as oxidisation, changing colour as temperatures increase and going from yellow to brown, then purple and finally blue.
Compared to normal steel, this process requires higher temperatures for stainless steel, which is enriched with chromium to prevent corrosion, creating the bench's two-tone finish.

"Normally, steel all looks the same and then when you put it in the oven, you get these crazy, hidden colours," Wijnant told Dezeen. &q...