Copper Color: From Polished Copper to Green Patina

Fresh copper is pink-orange, with a warm, reddish shine. Brass leans gold, bronze leans brown and steel leans gray, but copper looks almost red when the light hits it.

In the air, copper darkens. First it turns a warm brown, then a deeper brown, and outdoors, after years of air and moisture, a green and blue-green patina appears. That's the green copper you know from roofs and old buildings. Steel, on the other hand, rusts to orange and brown, like Corten steel.

Every stage is beautiful, and any of them can be the finish of your project. The only question is which one you want to see on the day the piece arrives.

Patina forms when copper reacts with the air and with moisture. In nature that takes years, and each side of a building gets it a little differently. We call the green and turquoise that appear on copper green patina and turquoise patina.

In our production facility we give copper its patina by hand, so you choose the tone up front instead of waiting for it. A turquoise and blue-green patina gives Copper Tiffany Patina, and a soft brown patina gives Smoked Patina Copper. The patina looks alive, and every piece takes it a little differently.

Once the patina is right, we seal it under a clear coat, so the tone you approved on the sample stays on the wall. We wrote about that layer in our article on the ceramic clear coat.

Copper-colored paint gives you the color, but not the metal. Even a metallic paint with a copper shine stays paint, and you can't polish it or give it a patina. When you want an even copper color in paint, that's a job for architectural painting.

We make real copper in three ways. A liquid metal coating carries real copper powder in a binder, and it also works on MDF and wood. In arc wire spraying the layer on the piece is the copper itself. And a piece already made of solid copper gets its finish directly on the metal, through Metal Finishes on Solid Metals.

In all three ways we polish the copper and give it a patina the way you would copper, because each one puts real copper on the piece.

Four tones in our catalogue show copper's whole journey. Polished Copper is red-orange with a mirror shine. Smoked Patina Copper is softer and quieter, a red-brown with a satin sheen. Copper Tiffany Patina spreads turquoise and blue-green over warm copper. And Blackened Copper deepens to brown-black, with warm copper glowing only along the edges.

The first three are made as a liquid metal coating, on solid copper and by spraying, and Blackened Copper only as a liquid metal coating. Sprayed copper we polish to a mirror.

And that isn't the whole list. We make many more copper tones to order, as a liquid metal coating and by spraying too. You'll find the whole collection on our finishes page.

From panels. We finish made-to-measure panels in our own production facility, and then they are installed on the wall. That way every panel gets the same copper coating and the same finish, and you get a metal feature wall and wall cladding that look like one material.

One copper wall changes a whole room. In a hotel lobby, behind a reception desk, on a bar front or on a TV wall at home, copper is the first thing people see, and the light on it changes from morning to evening. Elevator doors in brushed copper and in turquoise patina have also come out of our production facility, a good idea for lobbies.

In an apartment in Jaffa, designed by architect Tzipi Segev, we coated the dining area cabinets and the TV wall in liquid metal copper over MDF, and the copper runs between them in one line.

The best way is to hold the finish in your hand. Copper looks different in morning light and evening light, next to wood and next to stone, so you choose the tone on a sample, not on a screen. Pick from our sample set, or ask for a sample made for your project.

From sample approval to finished pieces usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. Since 2017, more than 1,000 projects in Israel and around the world, all made in our own production facility.