Kitchen Study Highlights 5 Future Trends

The Cosentino Group, working with industry experts, have published their 2017 Global Kitchen Study which predicts the characteristics of the kitchen of the future.

The annual study took information from interviews with 17 kitchen and food experts and a survey of 842 kitchen and bath retailers from Australia, Brazil, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Here are the five main findings.

Kitchen of the Future | KitchAnn Style

Key predictions in the Global Kitchen report include:

Hyper-Connectivity:

Over 70 percent of the retailers surveyed said that they believed the most important kitchen trend is connectivity. Users will increasingly want their appliances to be smart, connecting to the Internet of Things (IoT), to their smartphones, and to each other.

This will “professionalise” the space – increase the homeowner’s relationship with the kitchen, either through greater access to equipment, that until now has only been available in the catering sector, or by expanding knowledge and the growing interest in food, nutrition, safety and foodie culture.

Kitchen of the Future | KitchAnn Style

Image via Electrolux Design Lab

What to read more about kitchen technology? Check out my previous post about Virtual User Experience Technology (VUX)  Where we want technology and how we want to use it will shape much of how we live and interact in our homes.

Sustainability is Key:

Close behind connectivity, users want their appliances to be sustainable.  Fifty percent of those surveyed thought that smart waste management was an important kitchen issue. The kitchen of the future will incorporate the use of materials which do not require aggressive chemicals for cleaning or much water. Manufacturers and Designers will shift towards design thinking aligned with a circular economy – Rethink, Redesign, Repair, Reuse and Share, Remanufacture, Recycle and Recover.

Kitchen of the Future | KitchAnn Style

Hub of the Home:

The kitchen will develop as a multi-functional space in all countries and is expected to disappear as an independent room. This shift in design will empower homeowners to make better use of space, letting the kitchen move to suit the activity and the user. For example, Cosentino  envisions a countertop that can easily drop to a comfortable height for children, raise up for kitchen prep and then transition to bar height for entertaining friends and enjoying cocktails.

Kitchen of the Future | KitchAnn Style

 Tipic’s Tulèr kitchen for Offmat as seen in Milan

Professional Products:

Home cooks here already love French door ovens borrowed from commercial kitchens. In the kitchen of the future equipment shall be at the service of the kitchen as a beautiful experience of everyday life and not just as tools to help you cook faster. About 40 percent of those surveyed believe that kitchen countertops of the near future will include screens and internet connectivity, which could be used to look up recipes and cook along with videos of professionals.

“Global Kitchen is an international project providing valuable insights into the kitchen of the future and aims to become an essential reference tool for professionals and consumers.  It creates the opportunity for multidisciplinary reflection to analyse the effect of globalization on kitchen architecture and design, to determine how this space will develop over the next 25 years.” -Santiago Alfonso, marketing vice president for the Cosentino Group

Health and Well-Being:

As the popularity of aging-in-place rises and kitchens become increasingly multi-generational, kitchen design will trend toward comfort and ease for users at all life stages. Natural light and lighting systems that mimic it will be a priority in kitchen design. The kitchen of the future will seamless integrate technology, which now are mostly add-ons, to the point that we won’t notice its presence.

Kitchen of the Future | KitchAnn Style

Prisma Kitchen

To view the complete Global Kitchen study, please click here:  https://cosentino.box.com/s/q468swe4cpxdbq3ez0fehdndrmwrepbd

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