Karol Italian Kitchen Designs
23 December 2009
“Mama Said, Mama Said”
Speaking of tile, which I often am in these blogs, there is an Italian maker of all things kitchen and bathroom that I wrote about last week that is using tile in some truly warm and wonderful ways, for those of us who would prefer a more traditional approach to a kitchen.
Actually, Karol is an Italian company that has been producing bathroom and kitchen furniture for some thirty years now, and a good share of their output is contemporary, primarily the minimalist look that is so popular in Europe these days. And minimalism is popular for a reason, because so many of the homes in Europe are considerably smaller than they are in the United States, so designers who think small, but grand (because minimalist or not, these designs are truly mind blowers) tend to do well for themselves.
A lot of attention has been paid to these designs in recent years, and I have certainly done my fair share of it! But it’s gotten to a point where a fair number of people in this country have come to believe that Europe does nothing these days except minimalist kitchen and bath designs. Au contraire!
I mean, really now, think it through. Who invented that warm Italian kitchen with the heavyset Italian mama, apron wrapped around her, exhorting friends and family to eat, eat! That lady and her happy family have lived in kitchens like those shown here for centuries. And still do.
The kitchen designs we feature here from Karol are brand new kitchen designs that call to mind the wonderful Italian country kitchens of years gone past. The doors are made of solid walnut, characterized by a hand-made manufacturing procedure, the better to give to these cabinets the look of those made by those wonderful masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The wall cabinets are also of solid wood; the drawers have been finished with dovetails, and the locks are all in ancient metal. They have also dressed up these kitchen designs with wonderful finishing details like plate racks, worked beams, dressers, and other complements that equip these kitchen designs with the charm of what life once was.
Finally, to return to the place of true beginning, as a surveyor laying out metes and bounds would say, there is the tile with which we began this blog. Many of the wooden cases we show here are covered with tiles of various dimensions, and there are also wooden, marble, and stainless-steel panels, all of which allow Karol to join together classic motifs and modern fixtures with a flair for the exactly right that seems indigenous to Italian designs these days. And the exactly right brings us, as it always does, back to mama, ’cause she’s always right, specially when she’s exhorting her family to “Eat, eat!”
Joseph
No comments yet
Leave a Reply