Kitchen Clarity Adventures in Kitchen and Bath Design

For me, the best thing about the Brizo event at New York Fashion Week was hearing designers talk about design at the most fundamental level. We were treated to a presentation by Judd Lord and Seth Fritz from Brizo’s product design team, and their excitement over the existing and the future products was just palpable. I suspect that as product designers at Brizo they have one (two) of the best jobs in the world – they get to travel the world absorbing trends and inspiration, and then to see a project through from idea to a product you or I could put in our homes. The task of the engineering team must be a somewhat less enviable one – though no doubt they are people who thrive on challenge. Here is product designer Judd Lord, revealing all the mouth-watering future products that I’m not allowed to tell you about:

Yes, they’re under that drape, and that’s all I can say right now. But they’re going to be awesome! In the meantime, there was plenty of excitement to share about the existing products:

I’ve mentioned RSVP before – its silhouette is inspired by a vintage couture fashion illustration – I don’t have the exact one we were shown, in which the flowing lines and simple elegance inspiring this faucet were so clear (the model even had her arm outstretched to one side with a wrap cascading over it) but here’s something to give you the general idea:

I’m sure the flowing curves were quite a challenge to the engineering team on their own, but do you notice how this faucet flows from waistline to hemline without a single seam or join, just like the skirts in the fashion illustration? There is no extra ring or plate at the bottom, to break up the line and act as a dirt magnet. Most faucets aren’t made like that, because it is more difficult, and more expensive, to do.  Isn’t it great that the team at Brizo are prepared to take the extra trouble to make something like that happen?

I was so happy to hear the designers talk about the concepts and inspirations behind the products,  such as the twists of European wrought iron, swan-neck curves, mountain streams, or the drooping arc of a dying flower. I was particularly charmed to find that the handsome Baliza

was inspired by the shape of a Portuguese lighthouse. As soon as you know, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

They didn’t say which lighthouse – and Portugal as one of the great seafaring nations has plenty of ruggedly elegant examples to choose from – built to endure centuries of the very worst that nature can serve up, a lighthouse is a great metaphor to inspire a kitchen faucet, don’t you think?:

Of course, it’s not necessary to know the underlying concept in order to enjoy the product – a good concept is something  around which the design coalesces. If a lighthouse is rugged, elegant, and enduring, then all aspects of the faucet should be too – but it’s not going to be as literal as a little model of a lighthouse that happens to spit out water and is perfect for kitschy, beach-house interiors! When the concept is the vintage couture fashion illustration, everything reflects that exclusive flowing elegance, without literally imitating a gown.

I’ll admit that the lighthouse metaphor resonates particularly with me because as a cruising sailor in cloudy Western Europe in the days before GPS and satellite navigation, I appreciate their life-saving function – that, and as a child, it was actually my ambition to be a light-house keeper. Guess I really didn’t like people much back then! So knowing the underlying concept definitely does increase my enjoyment of the Baliza design, but it’s not essential to it.

Sailing at night out of sight of land, we used to look out for the loom of a light – that’s when the beam of light from a beacon is visible in the sky, even though the lighthouse itself is still out of sight over the horizon. There’s something viscerally comforting about that loom, your first indication that you are on the right track. In a complicated way that I am struggling to express, a good design concept works something like that – you don’t have to see it literally, but its presence at every stage makes the journey from idea to finished product a successful one.

Sometimes in kitchen and bath design I feel that the concept gets pushed aside by the details – we spend so much time on fixtures and fittings, appliances and inches of counter space, that the entire conceptual level of design is just assumed or ignored.  Now, in the space of a little over a week,  I’ve had the opportunity to talk design with the Brizo team, attend Jason Wu‘s New York Fashion Week show and meet the designer, listen to master kitchen and bath designer Jim Krengle talking about trends and directions in kitchen design, and to meet the inimitable Johnny Grey and attend his seminar on the post-culinary kitchen.  My design cup is literally running over – but as soon as my thoughts settle a bit (and my brain stops hurting) I will attempt to share some of them here.

Related Posts:

• KBIS part 2 – Brizo, Blogger 19, friends old and new
• Round and round the kitchen
• Johnny Grey Studios – Reinterpreting the Country Kitchen
• Calling lighthouse lovers
• For every problem, a solution, part 2