These days, when you need a commonplace household item, a quick click of a button will zoom it on over, sometimes even the same day. But not so long ago, when you wanted to browse a catchall shop for everything from paint colors to wood glue to paper towel holders to waste bins, you got up, left your house, and went to your local hardware shop. Nothing fancy or over the top—just a brick-and-mortar filled with thousands of small items to keep a home running.

Now, there’s an unexpected joy that happens when you go and actually browse the aisles. Maybe it’s the thrill of discovering quirky bric-a-brac for your dresser, or finding items that ignite a DIY decor idea—but designers agree that these days there’s a specific spark you get when wandering your local hardware store that can’t be replicated online. “The smell alone—a faint mix of sawdust, metal, fertilizer, and possibility—feels deeply nostalgic and oddly comforting,” says Christine Gachot of Gachot Studios. “I always leave with things I didn't know I needed but suddenly cannot live without.”

Part of what makes the hardware store so creatively adventurous, designers say, is what it isn’t: a showroom. There’s no narrative or overly styled vignettes. “A hardware store presents inventory. It’s relentless, indifferent, and democratic,” says Brittney Hart, co-founder of the design studio Husband Wife. “The absence of agenda invites projection.” As Jordan Mosslar, founder of LA-based Form LA, puts it: “Nothing is trying to persuade you. It allows you to see materials for what they are and imagine new possibilities.”

And for a lot of hardware stores, they go beyond the nut bolts (literally), offering a distinct selection of items that designers genuinely love and put to clever use. Jessica Alpert of Jessica Alpert Design shares that for her, Liz’s Antique Hardware in Los Angeles delivers on that note. It’s less a hardware store than a jewel box of one-of-a-kind antique knobs and pulls that can make cabinetry feel specialized. “Those one-of-a-kind pieces instantly elevate a project and make it feel completely unique," she says. “Mixing old, character-filled pieces with new cabinetry creates this layered, collected feeling.”

For Andrea Goldman of Andrea Goldman Design, a Palm Beach project took an unplanned turn when she discovered a series of small, regionally-inspired art prints at a local hardware shop and ended up using them in the bar area. “This created a shift in the room to a more lived-in sensibility, like the works always belonged,” she says. “Our clients connected to them instantly.”

Designer Matilda Goad has built a thriving business model founded upon this kind of instinct. The London-based founder and creative director of MG&Co. loves hardware stores so much that she opened her own in London, reframing hinges, handles, and knobs as objects worth lingering over, displayed in the same vein as you’d show jewelry. Goad was drawn to what she calls “the quiet order” of the traditional ironmonger—from the drawers and compartments, the sense of discovering rather than simply shopping. “Choosing thoughtful hardware is a commitment to longevity,” she says. “It’s an antidote to disposable design.” To Goad, a well-chosen handle or latch is evidence that someone looked beyond the surface and chose something for its quality, proportion, and character.

Goad hopes her own shop encourages people to notice what they handle every day: “The feel of a handle in the hand, the weight of a latch, the way a finish catches the light at a particular hour.”

Ellen Van Dusen approaches the hardware store the way she approaches most design problems: scrappily. When the designer needed lighting for a renovation and was aghast at the cost of fixtures she actually liked, she headed to her local hardware store, bought basic metal-plate fixtures, and painted the bases herself—in stripes, of course. “People ask me where I got them all the time,” she says. “At $50 a piece, you can't beat the price.” It’s a reminder that the hardware store rewards a certain DIY confidence with the willingness to see what something could become with a little paint and dedication.

It’s the exact kind of thinking a good hardware store inspires: the sense that the right object, found in the right moment, can transform a space—regardless of where it came from.