Signature Kitchen Suite, the household appliances brand of the Korean company LG, is inaugurating a large exhibition area of 1100 square meters at Piazza Cavour in Milan. Calvi Brambilla, an architecture studio that masterly interprets the Milanese style, has characterized the area, which is organized on three levels, by setting up markedly spectacular kitchen corners in a balance between contemporary rarefaction and references to the great classics of Italian furniture design. We talked about it with Fabio Calvi, co-founder of the studio together with Paolo Brambilla, and Manuela Ricci, who is the Marketing Director of the brand.

Signature Kitchen Suite is opening its first European showroom. Why Milan?
Manuela Ricci: Milan is the international capital of design, architecture, and fashion. We chose to be in the heart of the city, in a popular street, also to involve citizens through a series of activities and to carry on a concept of accessible luxury and exclusivity. I believe that the era of hidden showrooms that you can only visit by appointment, is over – just like for the big fashion brands, which have very large and visible spaces, we also want to encourage people to enter, addressing both B2B and B2C.

Household appliances hides a rather strong technological nature behind decidedly essential appearances. How do you create the space and narration of such a cryptic product?
Fabio Calvi: You do it by creating stories around it that are abstractions of the same spaces we see in the city. The project brief was twofold – on the one hand we wanted to highlight our Italian nationality and the city of Milan through design, and on the other hand we were asked to show a positive contemporary world. It was LG who suggested we used contemporary art. Art is a gym in which you experience experiences, images, it is a small bubble in which you are free to do anything –  it is the last real exception in which I believe embryos of what makes the world go on are expressed. As designers, we had no desire to make contemporary art, but we could at least mention it, creating a pool of users and interests in the narration of the product.

How is the space articulated, and how did you express this double reference to art and Milan?
F.C.: Downstairs, we tried to hint at Milan and the world of design by simulating a series of rooms, each one characterized by a specific color, where some freestanding products of Signature Kitchen Suite and other brands of LG such as LG Objet and LG ThinQ™ were placed. Working with the color block system allowed us to create a warm environment while giving the rooms an abstract, photographic quality. Moreover, we included a selection of furniture designed by Milanese designers – Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Angelo Mangiarotti, Franco Albini, Gaetano Pesce… - also introducing some not-so-obvious pieces, for example the San Carlo armchair designed by Achille Castiglioni for Driade, reissued by Tacchini. On the ground floor, instead, we created a very neutral space where we focused on three installations, recounting our relationship with food and its preparation, the ritual of cooking, and the fact that we work with cold and heat at the same time, two opposite worlds that coexist in the same environment.

How does the space conform with the True to Food philosophy? M.R: On the ground floor, a kitchen visible from the street has been installed for cooking demonstrations, marking a continuity between the inner and outer space of the city. On the second floor, instead, True to Food expresses itself with a Food Academy, a real cooking school and much more, where we will host talks and lessons not only on how to cook but also on food, because the respect for food and its essence is our philosophy.

Over the last century, the kitchen moved from a segregated and solitary corner for the preparation of dishes to the epicenter of the house open to the virtuosity of show cooking. What further scenarios do you expect to emerge?
M.R: What the market tells us is that today, the kitchen is more and more liveable, open, adapted to an increasingly professional food preparation. The appliances, now on view, become beautiful and take possession of other spaces, occupying the living room with wine cellars and creating new spaces just for them, like it happened with laundry rooms.
F.C.: When I was a child, there were these rather utopian books about flying machines and self-cooking chickens. Today, however, our reality is far from this, and as designers - being basically little dictators - our task is to put things in order. In the kitchen, the risk is that aesthetics will take over the functional part: I believe that a kitchen should be designed according to the sequence of gestures and actions in which it is used.

I know it’s too soon, but do you already have plans for the Salone? M.R.: We have confirmed our presence at the exhibition, the idea is to create a virtual and technological bridge between Rho and the Fuori Salone. We’ll see what will happen: during these months, we have learned to move forward freeing ourselves from old habits, such as the opening that to work must accommodate at least four hundred people. The world changes and forces us to do things differently, but this is not the same as stopping us. Koreans have a nice expression to tell this attitude: “pole-pole”, which means doing things in little steps, but quickly. This also applies to Signature Kitchen Suite: we take little steps, but we don't stop.