The KIT was inspired by the way our kitchens are changing. As Kim Colin, cofounder of Industrial Facility explains, the kitchens have been shrinking. While kitchens are designed open to the home, they are 13% smaller than in the 1960s, and urban developments especially are increasingly configured around people cooking or just heating up simple, prepackaged meals from companies like Blue Apron.
Then COVID-19 came along. “Now that people are in lockdown, there’s all this joy of cooking going on,” says Colin. “People are rediscovering sourdough and learning how to grow useful kitchen herbs.” So even in a small space, you might want to have a lot of cooking capability, customized to what you want to do.
In response, Future Facility developed the KIT. All of its appliances, including the refrigerator, sit on the floor and only extend to waist-height. Yes, that means you need to bend down to use them. However, these items are heavy, so they serve as the base of the structure. From there, people can plop stainless steel countertops on top, or connect cantilevered shelves on the sides—giving appliances useful wings.
“We said, let’s think of a module of appliances we could hang a kitchen off of, instead of the other way around,” says Colin.
