fbpx
We rely on advertising revenue to support the creative content on our site. Please consider whitelisting our site in your settings, or pausing your adblocker while stopping by.
Azure Sept/Oct 2024 issue cover

Get the Magazine

Spotlight: Kitchen
Our Spotlight is all about great kitchen design, from projects to systems that we saw at EuroCucina.
Deborah Wang Kitchen
DesignTO’s Deborah Wang Revamps Her Friends’ Condo Kitchen
1/7
Brutalist kitchen by StudioTamat
In Rome, a Kitchen Reno Champions Modern Brutalism
2/7
Colourful office kitchen
These Office Kitchens Are a Case Study in Colour
3/7
HEAD Geneve exhibition at Alcova 2024
Two Alcova Exhibitions Pay Homage to Mealtime Traditions
4/7
Vertical Groove kitchen system by Modulnova
4 Standout Kitchen Systems We Saw at Eurocucina 2024
5/7
Vipp V3 kitchen island launched at Eurocucina 2024
Eurocucina 2024 Trend Report: 4 Sculptural Kitchen Islands
6/7
Mantle by Signature Kitchen Suite appliances
4 Stunning Kitchen Appliances for Cooking and Cooling
7/7
Spotlight: Kitchen
Deborah Wang Kitchen

There’s an emotional connection to the kitchen table that’s quite unlike the one to any other piece of furniture. From intimate family meals to boisterous dinner parties with friends, it’s a setting for connection and comfort, a spot to share thoughts, creativity and celebration. It’s also where Toronto architect Deborah Wang and her long-time friends Andrew Sardone and Philip Sparks began chatting about the latter couple’s kitchen renovation. After living in their 84-square-metre, one-bedroom condo in a converted Victorian-era church in the city’s Junction neighbourhood since 2014, Sardone and Sparks had outgrown their kitchen in function and aesthetic. “It was a standard condo kitchen designed for a future unknown inhabitant,” Wang...

Brutalist kitchen by StudioTamat

The city of Rome is as vast and sprawling as it is ancient. And while the centre may feel like a living archaeological museum, once you move outward, the urban fabric shifts into a patchwork of modern housing blocks, Fascist Era monuments and lesser-known deposits of crumbling Roman ruins. Equidistant from the historic centre and the Lazio coastline is the small suburb of Tor de’ Cenci, a green lung on the metropolis’s southern periphery. It’s here, far from the hectic heart of the Italian capital, that a Sicily-born couple who work as a criminal lawyer and a financial consultant chose to set down roots in a 1980s apartment building.

StudioTamat

After discovering the Rome-based firm StudioTamat — made up of Tommaso Amato, Matteo Soddu and...

Colourful office kitchen

It’s rare that the kitchens in an office refurb are given the same attention as the rest of the project. Yet Studio Rhonda’s transformation of a listed early 19th-century malt-house in Banbury, England, into the HQ for design-centric pet accessory brand Omlet resolutely bucks that trend by turning them into warm and inspiring focal points. With their use of tonal pigmented colours and cohesive yet unique personalities, the project’s four kitchen areas “act like signposts,” explains Rhonda Drakeford, founder and creative director of the London-based studio, “so staff can say ‘Meet me at the yellow kitchen for coffee!’ ”

Studio Rhonda
Studio Rhonda

Drakeford referenced the rich palette of the existing vaulted space — its exposed rust-hued...

HEAD Geneve exhibition at Alcova 2024
Place Setting
Decorative spoons on metal shelf
PHOTO: Pier Giorgio

Leave the shiny silver spoons to stiff upper-crust functions — any dinner party served with Natalia Criado’s plated brass cutlery seems like it would be far more fun to attend. In the kitchen of Villa Borsani (the more intimate of Alcova’s two Milan Design Week group exhibition venues, both former residences in the city’s Varedo area), visitors swooned over a selection of the Colombia-born, Italy-based designer’s geometric cutlery and serving utensils, which walk the line between functional tableware and elegant jewellery. While the designs reintroduce a certain sense of ceremony to mealtimes, their unexpected play of proportions feels more fanciful than formal. Rather than...

Vertical Groove kitchen system by Modulnova
1
Vertical Groove by Modulnova
Vertical Groove kitchen system by Modulnova

Combining walnut in a warm chocolatey Moka finish and an alluring Silver Roots marble countertop, the Vertical Groove floating island by Modulnova illustrates the appeal of natural materials. The textured wood panelling includes an innovative handle-free door opening system that maintains a sleek and clean-lined aesthetic, while the thickly streaked marble shows up again as a chunky plinth that lifts the island off the ground (with the help of a thinner double metal blade at the opposite end).

2
Poetica by Scavolini
Poetica by Scavolini

With modern-day proportions and retro-inspired framing on its ash panel doors, Poetica by Vuesse for Scavolini brilliantly harmonizes the past with the present....

Vipp V3 kitchen island launched at Eurocucina 2024
1
Nami by Eggersmann
Nami kitchen island by Eggersmann, launched at Eurocucina 2024

Recalling the impressive force of a wave, Nami, by Yabu Pushelberg for Eggersmann, expertly blends Japanese styling with German engineering. Stepping away from convention, the dramatically cantilevered island reimagines the function of a space without dictating composition. Made from natural stone, the sculptural object was designed in conjunction with the Murphy-style depot pocket door (not shown), a “theatrical” system that can conceal or reveal the working side of the kitchen while letting the island take centre stage.

2
Tangram — Nuance by Cesar
Tangram — Nuance by Cesar

Originally designed in 2022 by Italian–Spanish studio García Cumini for Cesar, the Tangram kitchen system — which comprises five curved...

Mantle by Signature Kitchen Suite appliances
1
Mantle by Signature Kitchen Suite
Mantle by Signature Kitchen Suite

Designed by Patricia Urquiola to house Signature Kitchen Suite’s under-counter convertible refrigerator, Mantle is meant to be seen. Conceived for open spaces where the divide between living room and kitchen is hazy (as well as bedrooms, hotels and offices), the freestanding cabinet comes in Basic, Vertical (shown) and Horizontal versions, and is clad in wood (natural or colour-stained) or Cimento tiles, a cement made from natural components. In Vanilla, Blue, Burgundy, Green and Sand, the handcrafted tiles lend the unit a sculptural look.

2
“New Generation of Cooling” by Gaggenau
"New Generation of Cooling" by Gaggenau Appliances

The “new generation of cooling” from Gaggenau is a sophisticated fridge–freezer that can...