Starck by Warendorf Kitchen Designs
20 October 2009
“You Look Marvelous!”
“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral” is a line I’ve quoted before in these blogs, but whenever I see something as startling different-and as exactly right-as the kitchen designs I’ve featured in today’s blog, it washes over me like a tidal wave and leaves me gasping for breath. If there were such a thing as a Church for Ideas, these kitchen designs would surely be auxiliary chapels.
Phillippe Starck is a French designer who set out to “give as many people as possible the opportunity to experience the best there is,” and with these kitchen designs, he has done much to achieve that goal. He has recently aligned himself with Miele Kitchens in Europe, which is itself undergoing a transformation. Next year they will be Warendorf, and their first offering is shown herewith, namely “Starck by Warendorf.”
Actually, I think the man’s name should be Mr. Awesome! Mr. Starck has taken kitchens as we’ve come to know and love them and done something else altogether with them. Let’s start with the concept that first caught my eye, namely the Library kitchen design that tops this blog. It is both a striking design and a wonderful engineering feat. The trumpet-like feet are more than a design element; they hide the necessary pipe work and drains for the kitchen island. And the other appliances are hidden behind handle-less doors in the wall unit. It’s the kind of unit that would fit in wonderfully at one end of a large family room, as opposed to the normal let’s-dedicate-a-substantial-portion-of-the-house-to-this kitchen.
For those with even less room for their kitchen, there is the Primary Kitchen Design (it’s the one surrounded with yellow), which also has a supplementary module available. The Duality Kitchen Design (the stainless steel one) is in the form of a traditional wall element or detached kitchen island that also functions as a room divider. At one point my wife and I seriously considered a room divider for our 25′ long family room, and something like this, had we decided to do something else with the kitchen, might have been just the ticket.
Finally, there is the Tower Kitchen Design, which bills itself as “Cooking reduced to its essentials: water, fire, hot and cold-in rotating towers.” The Trumpet Table we show here is a work table that contains the sink and stovetop (the black area to the left of the sink), and it doubles as a dining area for those with limited space, or who want a table in the kitchen that’s IN THE KITCHEN!
Mr. Starck deliberately incorporated book shelves into the fronts or ends of the wall units because of his firm believe that food and culture are closely connected. In previous blogs I have talked about how one idea inspires another, and it really does. I don’t presume to know where Mr. Starck gets his ideas, but the interconnectedness of design is apparent to anyone who surfs the Internet in search of such things.
In America we often design huge kitchens that are then used more for a meeting place than a kitchen, and from that, Electrolux developed the idea of a Live-in Kitchen, because so many of us seem to do just that. And in Europe, so many of the designs being used fit quite nicely at one end of a great room that, because it can contain kitchen, dining room, and family room, really IS a Great Room. And this, in turn, brings us to the kitchen designs of Mr. Starck, whose kitchen designs are marvelous in the truest sense of the word. They’re a marvel.
Joseph
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