Steady.
A knife that disappears into the everyday.
The chef knife we wanted to come home to.
- — Drawn from a single piece
- — German steel, titanium-finished
- — Boring in the best way
- 01 / 18
Three things hold Steady together.
German steel, titanium-finished.
A forged core of German 1.4116 steel, shielded by a PVD Titanium Nitride surface tuned for the kitchen counter, not the cabinet.
Drawn from a single piece.
One gesture, one material, one object. Blade, bolster, and handle are pressed and ground from a single billet — no pins, no seams, nothing to trap what you cooked last night.
Boring in the best way.
A matte silver silhouette that vanishes on a walnut board. No logo on the blade. No decorative flourish. A tool that lets the ingredient speak — boring in the best way.
The Steady chef knife is a conversation between three eras.
Q: What if the point of a kitchen knife was simply to last?
A: In Solingen, the first generation of German chef knives set a workshop standard: a carbon-manganese core, forged, ground, and sent into kitchens expected to hold it for forty years. The geometry has barely moved since — because it didn't need to. Steady starts from that same 8-inch blade profile.
Q: What if the surface could be more interesting than the edge?
A: Mid-century Damascus revivals reminded the craft that a blade's skin tells as much of the story as its spine — pattern, reflectivity, how light moves across the surface. Steady inherits that sensibility but answers it with a modern PVD Titanium Nitride coat: matte, non-reactive, quiet.
Q: What if a knife looked boring, in the best way?
A: HomebodyPlus draws Steady from a single piece of metal, then finishes it in brushed titanium. The result is a chef knife that disappears on a walnut board — a tool, not a display object. The core is steel; the shield is titanium.
The lemon test, in real time.
T = 10 min · ambient · wipe only
Before the spec sheets and the cross-references, there is a kitchen test you can run with two lemons and ten minutes.
Three ingredients selected for acid (citric), pigment (lycopene), and tannin (polyphenol). Cut in half, applied to a cleaned blade, observed at minute one and minute ten. Wipe with linen between observations.
Bare carbon steel · Untreated edge · 90 seconds
Steady, titanium-finished · Brushed shield · 10 minutes
"The core is steel; the shield is titanium."
HomebodyPlus · titanium-coated chef knife
Titanium nitride is not a kitchen experiment.
The same surface chemistry that protects turbine blades, milling cutters, and food-line conveyors sits on the Steady edge — re-tuned for the weight of a home cook's hand.
Turbine blade surfaces.
PVD Titanium Nitride is the industry finish for jet-engine compressor blades — chosen for a hardness of ~2,300 HV and indifference to salt, acid, and fuel residue.
Milling & broaching tools.
Carbide endmills run four to six times longer in steel and titanium stock when TiN-coated. The same hardness keeps a kitchen edge from rolling on a walnut board.
Commercial food lines.
Conveyor pins, slicer shafts, and portioning blades on industrial meat and produce lines use TiN for non-reactivity — nothing leaches into the food stream.
The Steady chef knife.
Same titanium-nitride layer, deposited at 400 µm over a forged German steel core. In a home kitchen, that reads as a blade that doesn't argue with tomato, lemon, or rosemary.
| Bare carbon steel | Steady · titanium-finished | |
|---|---|---|
| Tomato | Acidic pulp clings to the bevel; a faint gray film transfers to the next slice. Film transfer |
Pulp slides off the brushed shield. Flavour stays where you put it. Wipe clean |
| Apple | Fructose + iron bond to produce a metallic aftertaste on the cut face. Metallic note |
Apple tastes like apple. No transfer, no carry into the next prep. Neutral |
| Garlic | Sulphur compounds etch a persistent haze along the edge. Haze · scent carry |
Sulphur wipes off under warm water. No scent carry into fruit or herb prep. Rinses off |
Steady is boring in the best way. The silhouette is the same shape it was in 1909. The handle is the same metal as the blade. There is no decorative inlay, no hardware, no logo stamped on the face.
What's left is a matte silver object that does its job and sits quietly on the board. A tool that ages the way good tools age — slowly, and without commentary.
- Dieter RamsTen principles for good design1976
- ApartamentoInteriors magazineMilan
- KinfolkIssue 47, The Slow HomeCopenhagen
- Donald Judduntitled (stack)1967
The ten seconds between done and tomorrow.
Rinse under warm water. Wipe clean with a linen towel. Stow, spine up, on the magnet rail.
The titanium shield means there is no special ritual — no oiling, no drying schedule. Steady asks ten seconds a day. That's the only rule.
Four Steps. Ten Seconds. Every Day.
Every Steady knife asks the same ten seconds, every night. Rinse, dry, stow, ready. The titanium shield does the rest.
Warm water over the brushed shield. No soap required for most ingredients.
One pass with a linen cloth. The titanium finish releases moisture in a single wipe.
Spine up on the magnet rail — edge protected, handle visible, ready.
Tomorrow morning, Steady is exactly where you left it. Wipe clean once more, go.
One Family. Four Blades.
Bread · Chef · Santoku · Paring
Four blades, one design language. Same German 1.4116 core. Same brushed titanium shield. Same matte silver silhouette that disappears on a walnut board.
Serrated edge for crusty loaves and ripe stone fruit.
The everyday blade. Tomato, onion, rosemary, repeat.
Flat profile for push cuts; balanced for softer produce.
Small work. Garlic, shallot, citrus supreme.
After the Kickstarter closes, here is what happens.
T+0 → Day 30 · fulfilment
Four phases. Thirty days. The Friday letter goes out every week — even the slow ones.
The risks we see, and what we will do about them.
HomebodyPlus has shipped small-batch hardware before. Here is where this project can go sideways, and the commitment we are making in advance.
Yield
Freight & customs
Updates
Change of mind
Two of Us. One Cat.
A Small Kitchen.
Ethan and Mia met at the crossroads of numbers and narrative — days that ran fast, dinners that ran slow. Jimbo supervises everything from the counter.
We sketched Steady on a notebook at this same counter — sixteen iterations, every clever flourish thrown out — until what stayed was simply what works at 9pm on a Tuesday.
We built the knife we wanted to come home to.
That's the kitchen we build for —
Boring in the best way.
Steady ships in April 2026. The core is steel; the shield is titanium. The rest is your dinner.
Back the project →19 / 19 · End of issue
READY WHEN YOU ARE
The second half of the meal.
Built around the wipe-down ritual that follows dinner.
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