Understand Old California’s
Old Penny Finish

By Jack Dack | August 26, 2026

You choose most of your home hardware finishes for how they'll look on day one. With Old Penny, you're choosing a process. One that starts the moment you unbox your piece and keeps going for decades.

It's a beautiful finish that warms, matures and eventually cools over a long stretch of time. Let me help you sus out if it's the right finish for you.

Old Penny is a layer of unlacquered copper on top of solid brass. Nothing is sealing that copper layer off from your environment. Left alone, copper reacts with oxygen and whatever else is in your local air. That oxidization reaction over time develops a layer of protective patina that mottles and bronzes like...you guessed it...an old penny. That natural patina is the finish.

This whole process depends on exposure to the open air, so we recommend this for exterior application only.

Take a look at these product photos. That bright, coppery pink-orange tone, often with streaking and patches of purple, blue, pink or green, is what your item will look like when it arrives.

All of the streaking is from the plating process. It's not a defect. And it will disappear.

The copper reactions during the plating process are affected by humidity. Something plated on a humid afternoon will come out looking different from one finished very early on a dry morning.

The streaks and colors come from light bouncing through the very first super-thin layer of oxide developing. The light bends and reflects in a way that creates rainbow-like colors, the same effect you'd notice in an oil slick on a wet driveway or the surface of a soap bubble. As that layer builds up and thickens over the following weeks, the colors fade out and the surface settles into a more uniform tone.

The chemical reaction that creates those colors is the same reaction that will carry on developing your fixture's patina for years. This is just its earliest, least even stage.

I tell people to think of the Statue of Liberty. It was bright copper on assembly and turned dull brown fairly quickly. It took on the full blue-green verdigris patina over a few decades. Copper gutters and roofing follow the same arc on a smaller scale, and Old Penny follows it too.

Salt air speeds everything up when it comes to the oxidization process. Expect Old Penny to darken and develop patches of verdigris faster than it would elsewhere.

Generally, lower humidity slows the reaction down, and inland fixtures take longer to show significant color changes. But slower isn't guaranteed. Sprinkler exposure, a humid patch of weather or a few days of back to back fog can speed up initial mottling quite a bit.

Consistent moisture in the air, even without salt, will accelerate the process. The finish will tend to see faster, more even darkening.

I've had customers call me very nervous when they open their box. I explain this aging process to them, and by a few months in they call back to tell us that everything looks they way they hoped it would (we included Emily's story below).

The initial shift from bright plating to warm, mottled brown is relatively quick, happening over weeks to months. Then, it's up to your home's environment to do its job. Whether your fixture develops the verdigris within a handful of years or settles into a rich brown for a long stretch before the green appears depends heavily on where you live.

What doesn't change is that it keeps changing. Weather and seasonal changes will continue to shift the finish throughout the piece's lifetime.