Aster Cucine TIMELINE Kitchen Designs
29 July 2010
“Nothing to Hide”
One of the more exciting concepts that I have encountered in writing these blogs for lo, these 600 plus postings, is the idea of a kitchen that occupies one end of a room that may then be called any number of things from family room to living room to, well, to my own favorite descriptive name which is simply Great Room. Growing up in the 1950s, our family got together every evening for diner and discussed the events of the day, learning along the way a fair amount of my parents’ values. Nowadays, families tend to grab a bag of fast food or a quick plate and head for separate bedrooms to while away the evening on computers. When Mom does not have to cook in a separate kitchen, but, instead, cooks at one end of a community room, suddenly what has been a heretofore separate family comes together in what just has be a Great Room, because it has successfully combated a most pernicious trend.
But in order for such a concept to really succeed, the kitchen design just has to be something that is going to work well at one of a Great Room. Because, come on, now, if you’ve just settled down in front of a big screen TV with a bowl of popcorn and a beer, you do NOT want to be doing that in the kitchen, right? No, in order for this concept to work correctly, the kitchen design itself must be something that is going to effortlessly blend into its environment at one end of the Great Room. But the other essential part of this is function, because if it does not do what it is supposed to do, well, what’s the point, really? The idea is not to have it blend in and be forgotten because it’s essentially useless; we want it to blend in, but still be a fully functioning kitchen.
And with that I can talk about Aster Cucine because these people have come up with a kitchen concept that does just that. Actually, Aster Cucine is one of the more innovative kitchen design companies I have yet encountered in my many cyberspace “trips” to Italy. Some time back I wrote a blog on their kitchen designs which I entitled “A Thump on the Head,” because, to me, their kitchen designs are stunning, which I mean in just about every sense of the word, up to, and including, the prodigious thump alongside one’s head that stuns.
But to return to this, Aster Cucine, in collaboration with New York design studio Workshop/apd, has recently introduced TIMELINE, a new signature kitchen collection that breaks new ground in kitchen design. It’s called TIMELINE because Matthew Berman and Andrew Kotchen, the design principals at Workshop/apd, deliberately set out to combine the old with the new in their approach to contemporary kitchen design challenges. They wanted to create a kitchen collection with a “vintage” look, but one that would effortlessly blend with contemporary life. So, how does one go about achieving that, exactly? Well, they created a kitchen design that features exquisite cabinetry, countertops and backsplash accents in the finest selection of materials including Venetian ceruse (a whitening compound used in the 16th century on human skin as well as cabinetry) applied to white oak; wire mesh inspired by French country cabinets, antique mirror glass; oxidized metal, weathered steel, and bronzed glass.
The result is both modern and ancient, contemporary and aged, but not hot and cold, more like hot, hot, hot! Seriously, it’s a collaboration that has pleased the people at Aster Cucine no end, and looking at the results, it’s not hard to figure out why they like it so much. Jacob Kindler, the U.S. managing director of Aster Cucine said that this collaboration “has produced a custom design kitchen system that yields both an astonishing piece of design and the ultimate in functionality,” and it really has. More than that, Kindler continued, “TIMELINE represents as much a work of art as the next generation in modern family living.”
And that, in turn, brings me back to where I began with this, the function of Aster Cucine TIMELINE as part of the new mode of living these days, a family that gathers in one room for cooking, eating, and living. As Mssrs. Berman and Kotchen at Workshop/apd put it, “Our kitchens, the heart of family life, are now part of our living environments and no longer hidden from view.”
Joseph
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