Titian Scheffer’s Gates and Screen Doors Hinge on Bold Colours (and Custom-Fabricated Metal)

Many of us toyed with new hobbies during lockdown only to drop them once we were allowed back out of the house. Not so Titian Scheffer, who makes eye-catching metal screen doors and gates. He turned his DIY project into a career.

An architectural concreter by trade, Scheffer spent his pre-Covid days making sinks and benches. But something began to irk him about the job. “I started researching how concrete was made, and I realised that, from an environmental perspective, it wasn’t great,” Scheffer tells Broadsheet. “Every bench I made was a hole in an estuary somewhere.”

So when the pandemic hit and the concreting jobs slowed down, Scheffer started playing around with a welder at his factory in Mordialloc, in Melbourne’s south-east. “I spent two and a half years learning welding remotely and doing small jobs,” he says, “just figuring things out.”

He loved how sustainable steel was to work with (at least relative to concrete), and how forgiving. By the time lockdown was over, Scheffer had honed his craft to the point that he was making custom ironwork and steel things full-time.

And not just any old things. Today, Scheffer specialises in bold, graphic geometrically shaped gates and screen doors, painted in big, bright colours. He stumbled on the colour idea after completing an early job for a cousin, he says. “I was quite happy with the door, but then she painted it bright green and I thought, ‘Now that looks great.’” The jobs – and the colours – got bigger from there.

Not that Scheffer necessarily wants to be known as the colour guy. “I do a lot of black pieces as well,” he insists, pointing to the balustrades, fences, signage and tables he makes in addition to the trademark gates and doors. “But there’s so much charcoal going on in Melbourne, and colours are nice.”

They’re even nicer, he says, when you apply them directly to metal, and skip the powder-coating process favoured by bigger companies. “Hand-painting lets you see the texture of the metal,” he tells Broadsheet. “If it’s been forged, you can see the forge. You can see all that texture.”

Scheffer likens his aesthetic to rustic North African designs. “I don’t try to make them perfect,” he says. “I want them to feel human. If you look at Moroccan steelwork up close, you might think it’s not the best detailing. But if you stand back, because everything’s not perfect it just feels alive.”

Clearly, he has an eye for form. But Scheffer’s pieces do the job when it comes to function, too. “They’re all steel,” he says on the subject of safety. “They’re pretty impenetrable. No one’s getting through them.”

Would-be gate or door owners from all over Australia can get in touch via Instagram to commission their own bright, custom-built entry hardware, and Scheffer encourages clients to think laterally when it comes to designs. “Some people think, ‘My house was built in the ’50s, so I need a ’50s-style gate.’ But it’s okay to add on something that’s more contemporary, so long as it’s sympathetic. Otherwise you can get too matchy-matchy.”

To ensure a creative outcome, Scheffer starts by talking to clients about their preferences, before visiting the property (or poring over photos) to size up the environment. From there, he likes to get collaborative, “throwing ideas back and forth” before drawing a few sketches and arriving at the final design.

Then it’s back to where it all began: the welder and the forge, where Scheffer lets loose his creativity. “Steel’s just the most forgiving material. You can bend it, you can twist it, you can hammer it, you can change its form. Whatever’s in your imagination, you can make it.”

titianscheffer.au
@acme_scheffer