Conversation with Gianni Montagni

Dedicated to the brothers Roberto and Giuseppe Mion

It’s easy to say kitchen, thinking about a list of appliances, cabinets, and drawers, yet this is not the way to do it: A kitchen is like a dress or a suit, waiting to be sewn on a couple that has chosen a house to live in, therefore, also a space to celebrate the paramount rites of meals. Spaces and people are the two main factors to keep in mind.

If the house you live in has been lived in before, in the years, and the furnishings, and the tenants, the kitchen will have to provide original innovations and commodities, provided by fitting technologies, with an ease that determines spaces making use of a gratifying white, and that sometimes takes the colors of the usually forgotten and most natural properties of the materials used, going well together with the warm tone of wooden flooring.

The lighting, both natural and artificial, will represent a final essential component to fill the space up, as well as the opportunity to bond with the appropriate furniture, like a big cupboard sent ahead, in the room where the rites of meals continue and end.
Subsequently, it will be the artisan’s job to sew the dress up, letting the volumes surrounding a central core emerge, expanding the surface of a big pantry behind a wall panel, where one can so much as foresee the preferred colors around the lines that subtly adorn the numerous cupboards doors.

To come full circle a few things are sufficient: a clear-lined cupboard, a nice shelf that with its carved wood and white color connects to the next room, a long steel band at foot height, referring to an important matching cowl, yet not invading to the eye, and an oven that looks like waiting for you.

The dress is done, putting it together required the work of an artisan though. Even better, it required multiple artisanal talents working together: those who project, who make the single parts, who choose the adequate materials and colors. The experience of an old family of artisans and the aid of technologies of a small hard-working establishment.