Musa ovens and hobs: the kitchen as a stage

There is a precise moment when an appliance ceases to be merely an appliance and begins to become architecture. In the Musa collection, developed by BorromeodeSilva for Smeg, that moment is embodied in the surfaces, proportions and details that do not announce themselves but reveal themselves gradually. The starting point is the identity of a place: the contemporary kitchen, which, as designer Carlo Borromeo told Domus, “has become a stage, an expression of personality”, a place where architecture, materiality and everyday life converge.
From such transformation of space, Musa ovens and hobs derive their deepest meaning. Not neutral complements to be integrated into an interior, but elements capable of defining it.

In Musa ovens, the most recognisable design gesture is the porthole: a front panel that redefines the relationship between exterior and interior. As Borromeo explained, his experience in CMF – colours, materials and finishes – developed in the automotive world suggested the idea: using textures to create a frame, and from that frame allowing a portal to emerge, one that “invites you to come closer and look inside”. Glass becomes a surface to be traversed by the gaze, enhanced by the contrast between gloss and matt finishes that amplifies depth and material presence. An aesthetic that evokes, not coincidentally, the lesson of Carlo Scarpa: “clean geometries, yet extremely expressive in their simple complexity”.

The ovens in the Musa collection, available in 60 cm and 45 cm formats and in matt black and silver finishes, offer a range of technologies spanning from the most essential models to versions featuring steam cooking, pizza programmes with a refractory stone, and combinations of microwave and traditional cooking. Technology becomes one of the multiple layers of domestic landscapes without ever emerging as an autonomous element: it remains integrated into the experience, invisible until needed.
In continuity with the ovens, Musa induction hobs translate the same visual vocabulary into a horizontal surface. The dialogue between gloss and matt finishes, which in the ovens operates through depth, becomes here a flat graphic composition, almost a notation.

The range includes models with Digi Touch display and Bridge technology, available in different power configurations and numbers of cooking zones, as well as solutions featuring Compact Slider Plus display and Multizone technology. Each variant responds to a different way of inhabiting the kitchen, without resulting in an aesthetic shift: the coherence of the collection brings together technological flexibility and continuity of language.
Musa is the latest expression of a vocation that has defined Smeg’s identity since its founding in 1948: making form as significant an argument as performance. It is a total project in which technology does not compete with aesthetics, but belongs to it.