BANKA™ Advance Gym Weight Bench

Most weight benches are bought the way a bag of cement is bought: one model, one colour, whatever the gym floor gets. PENT sells the BANKA as a configuration instead, and the arithmetic of that decision is what you order.

The BANKA Advance is built from two steel finishes, six woods and five leather colours, which comes to sixty versions of the same 1,460 millimetre frame. The steel is either brushed stainless or a champagne gold PVD-X coating. The wood is ash, ash stained walnut, black ash, natural oak, American walnut or the darker American walnut, and it is solid rather than veneered because the bare rails are what a hand or a foot actually lands on. PENT's argument for wood there is grip, and it adds that wood is antibacterial. The padded top stays leather, in beige, black, brown, white or grey, but it hangs from the steel and the timber rather than sitting on stapled plywood.

That top is in two parts, split on a central hinge. Behind it a notched arm holds the back at a set of fixed inclines or drops it flat, and the whole thing stands 564 millimetres high on a footprint of 1,300 by 485 millimetres.

Price tracks the specification rather than the function, climbing from stainless steel with ash at the bottom to champagne gold with dark American walnut at the top, and the configurator assembles your combination in 3D before you commit to it. PENT quotes three to four weeks to make a small item and sixteen to twenty-four weeks for a large one.