Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec rethink the bathroom for Axor

While I was in Germany last month I saw this vanity. Notice how the shelf over the sink is also the faucet.

Pretty cool idea and I love all of the tiered surfaces surrounding that sink. I learned while I was there that this sink and shelf are part of a new collection from Axor, the leading edge of the Hansgrohe brand. Brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec designed a collection of some 70 components that are intended to be mixed and matched to make a fully custom bath design.

A big part of that is that the sinks and tubs aren't pre-dilled. All you need is a carbide-tipped bore and you can have your faucets be anywhere you want them. That is a great idea. Here are some glamor shots of the collection.

My pals at Hansgrohe tell me that the Axor Bouroullec is already available in Europe and will be coming to North America this summer. You can see all of the components from the Axor Bouroullec on Axor's international website.

Homeier debuts a new idea in ventilation

Check this out.

Those three things are functioning as a ventilation hood. It's a really neat idea. Each of those three towers, for lack of a better term,  is 560mm tall and 180mm wide, is attached to the counter, rotates 270 degrees, and uses a remote blower to do the actual ventilating.

What I'm showing you here is the Alia from Homeier and it represents something really new in ventilation. The Alia towers can be combined  in groups of two, three, four or five, depending on the need. Kitchen pros, here's the spec sheet.

I can see using these on an island as an alternative to dropping a hood from the ceiling. Their height would make them more effective than a pop up extractor and that the individual units rotate just adds to that effectiveness. Great idea Homeier. What do you guys think?

Can a sofa cause cavities?

In looking over the Mon Amour collection from Italian manufacturer Desart, I would say the answer is yes.

I know, I know, there's room for everybody. But really?

A lot of effort went into these pieces, and they're very well made. But still.

They're fully customizable too.

Is it me or does this combination of stain and upholstery look like the queen bee alien from Alien?

Argh. What do you think?

I'm asking again, Gorenje please come to North America

The Slovenian appliance manufacturer Gorenje has been on my radar for around the last two years. They make exceptionally well-designed and well-priced appliances and they're only sold on the other side of the Atlantic. When Blanco had me in Germany last month to attend The Living Kitchen and IMM it was painful to see the number of innovative, new things that never make it to the US and Canada.

So on my first day at the show I was walking the floor and I turned a corner and saw this.

At long last. I'd been reading about this company's products for ages and finally, I'd get to see them for myself.

I was beyond impressed with all of their offerings but what really got me was a wall oven they're calling the iChef+. It is a wall oven that looks as if it has an iPad embedded in it.

the iChef+ takes the idea of programming the setting on an oven to a level I never thought was possible. It has to temperature or timer controls. Rather, it has a hi-def touch pad that walks you through anything you want to bake with a simplicity that masks the complex programming you're actually doing with noteworthy perfection.

The home screen looks like this.

From here you pick any of the oven's five modes. So if I just want to bake something conventionally, then I'd just pick SIMPLEbake. By selecting that, I get a menu that looks like this.

There are nine options that pop up and you just scroll through them to find the kind of food you want to bake. The oven then works conventionally.

If you choose the AUTObake mode, the oven takes over a bit more. Select the kind of food you're baking and the oven tells you which kind of baking pan to use. You tell it the size of the portion you're baking how well done you want your food and what time you'd like to serve dinner. The oven then sets the temperature and time by itself. No guess work involved. So if you want to make prime rib but don't know how, the oven does so just get out of the way and let it.

PRObake allows you to program up to three temperature changes over the course of baking or roasting something. That's revolutionary, frankly. I cook a lot and a lot of foods require temperature changes while they're in the oven. Setting and resetting the timer and temperature is a pain in the butt and I'd kill for a way to program all of that in advance.

Not only that, once you set your cooking program in the PRObake mode you can save your recipe to MYbake.

This means you only have to program these settings once. So the prime rib temperature combo you've perfected can be saved as My Prime Rib in the MYbake library and the next time you make it, all you need to do is click on the title of your recipe. Slick!

Finally, the EXTRA mode holds all of this oven's additional features.

Note that it has a defrost mode and this is a convection oven, not a microwave. I'm as impressed as I remember it as I was when I was playing around with the controls.

Gorenje has a video that goes through the features of the iChef+ and what it communicates better than anything is how easy this oven is to use.




So after seeing that, maybe you can join my petition drive to get Gorenje to cross the pond. Please.

Finally; Something new, gorgeous, European and available in North America

This is the Tuna wash basin from the Swiss manufacturer Laufen. How it gets its name is pretty self-evident. It's slick, streamlined and I think it's absolutely beautiful. There's a growing trend to have the sink and counter be made from the same vitreous china as a single piece and this is one of the loveliest expressions of that trend I've ever seen.

I've spent the last five weeks looking over and writing about beautiful new products that aren't available in North America and it's a real pleasure to write about one that's actually here. Thank you Laufen.