Electric blue, wings etched into metal, a star-shaped splashing tap, rivets protruding like details on a suit of armour. The sink by designer Niels Raoul Boone is not a bathroom object — or rather, it is, but only on the surface. We had already spotted it at Alcova during Milan Design Week, and we couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Boone is the founder of Nuts & Bolts, a Dutch studio working exactly on the boundary between production and experimentation. His approach to metal is that of someone who knows it from the inside: he etches surfaces by hand, builds ornamental forms that seem to come from another era, then colours them with a chromatic precision that brings them fully back into the present. The result is a visual language that is difficult to categorise — too craft-based to be industrial design, too functional to be purely sculpture.

The sink can be seen taking shape in the process photos: first the raw metal on the workbench, the etchings still bare, showing wings, figures in flight, marks that look like tattoos on steel skin. Then the blue finish, applied uniformly across the entire surface, turning every etched detail into a chromatic relief. The splash-shaped tap, the exposed bolts, the stars jutting out from the sides — everything works together to build an object that operates on multiple levels at once.

What strikes you about all of Boone’s work is the consistency between process and outcome. Nothing is left to chance — every technical choice carries an aesthetic one with it, and vice versa.