Designs of the Week: Kitchen Design

By guest authors Charles W. Bush and Kathy Hwang of 3Strand Innovation, a brand, design and business consultancy.

What are the necessities of your kitchen? Now that our eating habits have gone from picking fresh vegetables outside the window to making sure our freezers are filled with microwavable meals, we were curious how today’s modern kitchen has been adapting. As we were researching, we found two clear trends emerging from the kitchen industry: things are getting greener, and more compact. As more people adopt urban lifestyles, space and utility are becoming serious considerations for most modern kitchen manufacturers.

Ernestomeda

Designing small is hard, really hard. Yet this challenge will be the one to get right as we start moving into smaller homes and urban lofts. Ernestomeda’s elegant combination of stovetop, sink, and cutting board into a compact package has the potential to be an innovation in the kitchen market. This kitchen, where less looks like more, is great solution to a modern-day space problem.

Valcucine

Kitchens, by tradition, tend to have simple color palettes: either the warm light of woods or contemporary, stark contrast of black and white. This company embraces primary colors, which hide behind cabinets in a way that is both surprising and fun.

Berloni

Berloni’s kitchen has a similar style to the Ernestomeda. Seeing the sink lifted into the air has a unique way of bringing space and light into the kitchen.

Nolte

Nolte’s use of bright color and wood brings a very Italian feel to this kitchen and reminds us of many modern kitchens you can find today in Rome. It strikes a good balance of contemporary shapes and forms, while still holding onto many traditional elements of a kitchen. They also a offer a big-screen TV over the sink, in case you can’t live without Jon Stewart while you wash up.

Effeti

Effeti has to be our personal favorite this week. As we have written before, kitchen design needs to have a little bit of a lived-in warmth. While the wood cabinets are nowhere near being cutting-edge design, both examples have the potential of serving as a blank canvas. Using a simple wood, black or white color palette leaves room to bring your own color to the room through Italian Deruta plates or plants.

This segment is a part in the series : Designs of the Week