Ala Cucine Italian Kitchen Designs
31 August 2009
“Letting Go”
I know I write about modern European kitchen designs a lot, but I do it because I am so hungry for something different, which I think is why our readers come to this blog site, to see something else, something different, something that stimulates them to create a kitchen design that is both glorious and unique. But the other thing I find myself particularly liking about European kitchen designs is that they come up with ideas that work.
So, with that as preface, perhaps I can talk a little about Ala Cucine, because they have kitchen designs that are both new and eminently workable, and especially this is so when one considers what they have done with that old kitchen bugaboo, the blind corner. Ala Cucine does have a division of modern kitchen designs that has me salivating again, but today I want to concentrate on their traditional designs, because they have both a warmth and a practicality that I find particularly intriguing.
The kitchens themselves look like the Italian kitchens they are, which gives them a wonderful provincial look. You get the feeling there’s a wonderful grandmother somewhere who’s been cooking in these kitchens all her life—pleasantly plump, ready laugh, absolutely superb cook, right? But the other thing I like about these kitchen designs, beyond their warmth, is the amount of thinking that has gone into them.
The Elena kitchen design at the top of this blog has actually been built into the wall at the end that looks out. It’s really a fairly simple design idea. They simply put a false wall in front of the existing outside wall, thereby making it look like one of those old thick Italian farmhouses that has been standing for centuries. And with the space thus created, “embedding” the cabinets into the wall was simplicity itself. You simply wrap the framing and drywall around the cabinetry. You do need the room for such a concept, but the materials involved can be had for very little, whereas the idea itself, as they say, is priceless.
The other thing I particularly wanted to discuss is their treatment of blind corners. Making the blind corner accessible in wall cabinets is an easy fix, and I have seen any number of solutions I like, but my partner and I continue to argue back and forth about the various solutions to blind corners in base cabinets. Joe likes some of the more expensive hardware “solutions,” whereas I contend that they are ineffective and expensive, and he then retorts that they add a lot of “wow” to a kitchen. But, really, the best solution, for those with enough room for it (sadly, my kitchen is not among these!) is a kitchen design that either makes the very best use of space for that blind corner or eliminates it altogether. And this is what most impressed me about Ala Cucine and why I decided to write about them.
One of the ideas Ala Cucine has pursued with their kitchen designs is putting the stove in that blind corner. That’s an idea for kitchen designs that succeeds at several levels. It not only eliminates the blind corner, but makes it something glorious, because the stove can then sit in an alcove that is not really an alcove, but tucking it into the corner like that gives it the feeling of being in an alcove. It is also possible to make more of a statement with the kitchen hood, which is another of my mantras. If all you’re going to do is tuck a couple of booze bottles into what’s left of the cabinet over the hood after the eight inch vent has bisected it and rendered it essentially useless, then my contention is that you should just do something else with the space. Want some wow for your blind corner? Put the stove in it.
The other slick idea they’ve come up with for the blind corner is just dumping it altogether. If you look closely at some of these pictures, you will note that there is now a part of the wall jutting into the kitchen and forming a corner with cabinetry running on either side of it. Perhaps on the other side of that wall there is a closet that makes wonderful use of that heretofore essentially useless blind corner. The kitchen itself, though, is free of the cabinets in that corner, which means that these old knees don’t get sprung out of shape trying to get to… well, what do I get to in that corner? Nothing, really, which is why I’m so willing to just let it go.
Joseph
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One Response to “Ala Cucine Italian Kitchen Designs”
September 1st, 2009 at 9:59 PM
Oye… You really like calling inside corners “blind corners”. What is blind about them? There is no such thing as a “blind corner” in a kitchen. There are however “blind corner-cabinets”.
By the way, one thing I absolutely hate with the Elena kitchens is that the doors have arches on both the bottom cabinets and the top cabinets. That just does not work for me.
Joe