Kitchen cabinet
Cabinets may be finished with opaque paint, opaque lacquer and transparent finishes such as lacquer or varnish. Decorative finishes include distressing, glazing, and toning. The choice of finish can affect the cabinet's color, sheen (from flat to high gloss), and feel.Hardware is the term used for metal fittings incorporated into a cabinet extraneous of the wood or engineered wood substitute and the countertop. The most basic hardware consists of hinges and drawer/door pulls, although only hinges are an absolute necessity for a cabinet since pulls can be fashioned of wood or plastic, and drawer slides were traditionally fashioned of wood. In a modern kitchen it is highly unusual to use wood for a drawer slides owing to the much superior quality of metal drawer slides/sides.
Metal furniture
Steel indoor and outdoor furniture has been popular in this country since the '20s. Around 1925, Marcel Breuer, the Bauhaus furniture designer and architect, began working with tubular steel, having been impressed with the light weight and strength of the handlebars of a bicycle. The resulting furniture designs by Breuer and others using this material are some of the most important of the period.
But production of all outdoor furniture came to a sudden halt when the United States entered World War II and factories began churning out products supporting the war effort. After the war ended, those same factories necessarily switched to making products for peacetime pursuits – from swords to plowshares. Arvin Industries, for example, began production of metal lawn furniture and dinette sets in 1940 and stopped it by the end of 1941 when the US entered the war. The company began making bombs, radio communications equipment and parts for military vehicles among other things.