A Life Shaped By Steel 

For over twenty years Phillip Bowling, artisan blacksmith and founder of Noble Forge, has been proudly preserving the time-honored tradition of hand-forged metal artwork. While often partnering with top architects, contractors, celebrity decorators and designers, Phillip’s passion for metalwork flourishes with each project.

Phillip got his start in metal working in his hometown, Louisville, Kentucky; where he trained with local artisans and blacksmiths and later went on to serve a four-year apprenticeship with the Boilermakers Union. Determined to further master the craft of blacksmithing, Phillip ventured out west where he founded Noble Forge in North Hollywood in 1996. Always straying from commercial mass production, Phillip maintains an uncompromising commitment to the purest form of his craft in each one of his uniquely beautiful pieces.

History

Forging, or shaping metal using localized compressive forces, is one of the oldest known processes of metalworking. Ancient artisans and iron workers have been some of the key contributors in the rise of every major civilization. The blacksmith, as later generations came to call these craftsmen, individually hand-forged thousands of metal objects that made up the tools and equipment of everyday life. Soldiers, merchants, farmers and homesteaders came to depend on blacksmiths to supply them with everything from nails, to swords, cooking utensils, and irons. Many historians suggest that the success of many early societies was in fact due to the level of skill held by their blacksmiths.

As time went on the blacksmith fine-tuned his skills to create more intricate goods such as lighting appliances, home adornments, luxurious household fittings, decorative gates, and balustrades. Blacksmiths were also responsible for the superbly detailed wrought ironwork characteristic of European cathedrals and castles through the 17th and 18th centuries.