Pedini USA Italian Contemporary Kitchen Design
15 December 2008
“A Thing of Beauty…”
Ka chink, ka chink, ka chink… I’m trying to duplicate the sound of an Old West marshal walking down the streets of Laredo with his holstered gun slapping against his leg. “OK, boys, this is what we’re going to do,” he says to his deputies, “We’re going to come right at them. No one ever expects a bold move.”
Now admittedly, it is a very long way from a courageous Old West Marshal to an aging old man who sits in his study day after day looking for cabinetry and furniture design concepts to write about, but it is still true, nonetheless, that a bold move often saves the day, and especially this is so in kitchen design. Recently while surfing the Internet I came across a website for Pedini USA, which is the American
branch of an Italian company that has been producing kitchens since 1956, and is one of the first to develop the modular kitchen as it is today. Interestingly enough, because I do write about so many European kitchen designs that can only be obtained in this country with some difficulty, Pedini USA has showrooms in nineteen states, including Hawaii. A company serving the International Market to that extent is clearly going to have a large number of kitchen designs to choose from, but what most intrigued me is the kitchen design at the top of this blog, namely, the Artika.
The Artika uses curves in several different kitchen designs, but the boldest—and thus to my mind the best—concept is depicted here, the kitchen in the round, because for those of us with small kitchens, something like this might be just the ticket. Quite frankly, our own kitchen is not much larger than this, but because it is a standard kitchen, it has a standard kitchen’s limitations, especially those one would find in a small kitchen. Quite simply there is no room for anything, and you are forever tripping over yourself to get 
anything done.
Also, I have many times prepared food in a kitchen that is much too small and has the smallest food preparation space I’ve ever encountered, a freestanding chopping block used by the primary cook who is rather short and likes that particular work height. The problem, though, is that there is no other place to do anything, so all food preparation is done on that one most limited space. Given that set of realities, I have to think that the bolder choice—the circular kitchen shown here—would have very much been the wiser choice when that kitchen was designed.
And that, I think, brings us back to the problems so many of us have with our kitchens, especially those of us who live in older tract homes. Neither that kitchen nor our own is designed very well because they were done in the 1970s, and that’s so far away from our current sensibilities and ideas of what a kitchen should contain that they might just as well have been made in the 1910s when there really were no kitchens to speak of: just a sink, a stove, an icebox and a table.
Contrast that, if you will, with a modern kitchen designer like Pedini USA who takes as their philosophy “kitchen perfection,” their main objectives being “the quality and finish of the workmanship, a constant search for new alternative materials, flair and creativity in the interpretation of the kitchen space based on experience and state-of-the-art building techniques.”
What they set out to do with their Artika kitchen design was to provide an ergonomic, multifunctional island that was the heart of the kitchen, which in turn has a special sense of shape all its own, a new geometry, if you will: curved shapes, very smooth lines, round island, a perfection of space and design and function, all melded together in a confection that is nothing short of perfection. It’s like a Bach keyboard concerto, really, a joy forever.
Joseph
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One Response to “Pedini USA Italian Contemporary Kitchen Design”
December 15th, 2008 at 7:32 AM
Thanks you – very cool!