If you are hanging pots and pans, get an Enclume brass bar, which has the strength, ridigity and weight for heavy loads and which comes in 18 to 48 inch lengths, at 6 inch intervals. I have a 36 and 48 inch Enclume bars and they do not flex under load. This Mauviel bar flexes a bit just with light utensils.
The photos do not do this utensil strip justice. The gleam of the highly polished brass is causing glare in all the photos -even the photos on Amazon.fr! The real thing has a rich gold glow. The quality of polish is outstanding -It is even better than the best of Enclume and far better than any other brass I own.
This strip should be mounted in a conspicuous place, like under the hood and above the stove or under the upper cabinets on either side of the stove. The hooks are good for utensils, for anything with a wire loop or for anything with an oval cut or stamped hole. These hooks are not large enough for cups. I wouldn't hang anything heavier than a colander from it, owing to slight flex in the solid brass bar.
Don't buy it unless the cost is under $60: It is just a beautiful solid brass strip, a couple of pretty cast wall hangers, several stamped and polished brass hooks and common hardware. $40 would be the fair price, even at today's high brass prices. You could fabricate it all, minus the cast brass wall hangers, out of common brass stock costing about $30, but you'd have to spend hours drilling and cutting the sliding hooks out of flat stock and several more hours bringing it all to a high gloss luster on a polishing wheel. You could save yourself a lot of money, if your own time is worth less than $2/hour!
In my application, I bought two (at a slightly more than fair price) and had to cut one of the bars to length with a hack saw. That was an easy cut which also PROVED that it was solid brass -very rare in these days of plated metals. Even Enclume is plated, but it is the best plate method: First they electroplate steel with chrome, polish the chrome, electroplate again in brass, and polish the brass. This gives an extremely rich, deep, glossy brass, which is better than everything, excepting this singular Mauviel solid brass strip.
I mounted a 36 inch strip inside the back of the stove hood (flashy looking -stands out ten feet away!). The other two 18 inch sections are mounted on the back under lip of the adjacent upper cabinets. They are used to hang the most useful and best looking of German, French, Swiss utensils with loops on their handles, as well as a one cup measure (you don't really need a 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 3/4 cup measure once you get used to just judging those volumes in a one cup measure) and a ring of measuring spoons. I can feel flex to the strip even with this light load, so you can imagine how bad it would be to load a narrow non-rigid strip with real and expensive pots and pans.
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