The kitchen you don’t see

Experimental laboratory, status symbol, domestic prison or the creative and spiritual heart of the home? The kitchen more than any other room in the house has been the subject of continual modi cation as a result of technological, social and aesthetic revolutions. On the one hand the kitchen personifies the lifestyle of the homeowner and their relationship with the culture of consumerism, on the other it maintains its archetypal significance as the symbolic heart of the home. The picture that emerged from the latest edition of Eurocucina and FTK (Technology for the kitchen) underlined the trend for designing kitchens that open onto the living room and the desire to give visual continuity to individual pieces of furniture to create a single environment at a domestic scale. The kitchen is perceived as a domestic hearth but it is a highly-technological hearth.

Mirroring the way that our everyday lives have become filled with technology, the latest new products presented at FTK 2016 outline a vision that leans strongly towards the intelligent home, through devices that can connect applications and services to create safe and energy-efficient environments: refrigerators and ovens tted with internal cameras for monitoring – even at a distance – the presence of foods and the progress of a bake, along with the revolutionary control panel VUX (Virtually User Experience) – in the photo above – designed by the German manufacturer Grundig, that enables the hob, dishwasher and extractor hood to be controlled from a single interface thanks to a projector integrated in the cooker hood that visualises the virtual panel directly on the surface of the worktop. 

The kitchen is interpreted by designers not only in terms of function but also emotion, not only as a place for producing and consuming food but a place where you can move around, socialise, a place that is not just merely functional. This approach is translated in terms of style by a return to warm and welcoming nishes like wood, especially the kind that combines well with the naturalness of steel or marble, materials that traditionally characterise the operative spaces of the kitchen.