Pushing Contemporary Kitchen Frontiers

Valcucine’s overall goal is to create timeless, innovative and sustainable kitchens that put people and their well-being at the center, pursuing this goal by imagining its products in contemporary homes and sustainable structures on a journey of continuous improvement. In its search for inspiration, the company often looks to the modern frontiers of architecture – timber buildings, vertical forests, passive houses, LEED-certified buildings, homes integrated into nature, and redeveloped historic spaces – with the belief that it must provide solutions capable of meeting diverse design needs. Valcucine has an extensive catalog, but Artematica Soft Outline, Logica Celata and Riciclantica Outline are three excellent examples of how the company seeks to provide adequate solutions to the challenges that architecture increasingly poses to designers. One of the proposed solutions is the reuse and redevelopment of an internal environment, focusing on preserving existing structures. In this context, Valcucine has come up with essential modular complements, such as the volumes of Artematica Soft Outline, a collection in which art and mathematics merge to produce modular furniture elements with sinuous lines. Taking advantage of the flexibility of independent modules and curvilinear connections, Artematica allows the designer to reduce the composition, respond to spatial needs and, in the Soft Outline version, create the feeling of continuity through aluminum profiles that frame each volume. As space becomes an increasingly valuable resource, especially in rapidly expanding cities, the secret to adding green space may be to build it vertically, so that cities stop eating up surrounding land. This was the origin of adding a Logica Celata kitchen to a “vertical forest”. It has a large wall unit that is not only visually powerful, but also means that everything is within reach and can potentially be hidden. Such an approach is key to the underlying goal for this collection: to create a new ecosystem in an open environment where the kitchen and living space complement each other, offering an ever-changing vision of the home. Vertical forests are one of the ways to achieve sustainability in architecture, but in a more general sense, wood is also critical to this endeavor – and therefore a focus for Valcucine, as the company has long been committed to sustainability.  Wood is inherently versatile, light and durable, but when used indoors it can also be left largely untreated, without special additional coatings and finishings, producing a remarkable blend of performance and striking esthetics. This was the background for the creation of Riciclantica Outline, in which the company converges concepts of extreme dematerialization, flight and lightness through the realization of modular blocks, some of which can be suspended, protected by reinforced metal profiles that define the stylistic signature of the collection.