Kitchens · Desks · Fitted storage
Since a great many people now work from the room they cook in, the kitchen has quietly become the most demanding space in a home, and modular units bought by the metre solve neither problem well. We design and build to measure: cabinets scribed to walls that are never straight, drawers sized for what you own, a desk that shares the room without sitting in the splash zone, and enough separation that a laptop and a chopping board can coexist. Everything is made in our own workshop in solid timber and veneered panel.
About us
The workshop was set up by two cabinetmakers who had spent years fitting kitchens designed by other people and correcting the same mistakes in every one: a dishwasher door that hit the island, a corner cupboard nobody could reach into, drawers too shallow for a stockpot, a run of units that stopped ninety millimetres short of the wall and was finished with a filler panel. Designing and building in the same premises turned out to eliminate almost all of it.
We deliberately have no showroom. A showroom sells the kitchen it contains, and the entire point of what we do is that your room, your ceiling height, your window position and your habits determine the design. Instead we visit, measure everything properly, ask a long list of questions that customers find surprising — where the shopping is put down, who empties the dishwasher, whether anyone bakes — and produce drawings from that. It costs us sales and produces kitchens that work.
Four cabinetmakers work here and everything is made on the premises, which means the person who drew your kitchen is in the same building as the person cutting it and usually one of the two people who install it. Old apartments in this city have walls that lean, floors that fall thirty millimetres across a room and ceilings full of surprises, so scribing and hand-fitting is not a luxury service — it is the only way a fitted kitchen ends up looking fitted.
Advantages
Six differences you will notice every day for the next twenty years.
Modular systems come in fixed widths, and the gap left over becomes a filler panel — dead space in a room where storage is the whole point. Cabinets built to your dimensions run wall to wall, use the full ceiling height instead of stopping at a dust-collecting shelf, and turn awkward chimney breasts and sloping ceilings into cupboards. In a small apartment this routinely produces a third more usable storage from exactly the same floor area.
Old buildings have no straight lines, and a kitchen installed as though they did shows a tapering gap along every worktop and cornice. We template on site, scribe each panel to the actual wall and floor, and cut the fit in the room rather than in the factory. It adds a day or two to an installation and it is the single most visible difference between joinery that looks built-in and units that look pushed against a wall.
Before drawing anything we ask what you actually do: whether you bake, how much you buy at once, where the shopping lands, who unloads the dishwasher, whether two people cook together, how tall each of you is. Worktop heights are then set for the people using them rather than for a standard figure, and the arrangement follows the sequence of the work rather than a symmetrical elevation that looks good on a drawing and irritates you every evening.
Putting a workspace in a kitchen fails when it is a shelf in the wrong place: too close to the hob, in the light from the wrong direction, with nowhere for cables and nowhere to leave papers when dinner starts. We plan the desk as a proper zone — screen out of the splash and steam, sockets and cable routes built in, drawers that close on the work at the end of the day, and lighting separate from the cooking lights so it can be used when the room is not.
Cabinets are made from eighteen-millimetre birch ply or solid timber with proper backs, jointed and glued rather than dowelled together from thin chipboard that swells the first time a pipe weeps. Drawer boxes are dovetailed, hardware is from manufacturers who supply spares in fifteen years, and hinges and runners are chosen for their rebuild-ability. It costs more at the outset and it means the kitchen can be refinished rather than replaced when tastes change.
The designer, the maker and the fitter work in the same building and often are the same people, so a problem discovered at installation is solved in the workshop that afternoon instead of becoming an argument between a retailer, a manufacturer and a subcontracted fitter. We also coordinate directly with the electrician and plumber, because the majority of kitchen disasters are a services position agreed by nobody in particular.
Services
Kitchens, integrated workspaces, worktops, fitted storage, small-apartment solutions and repairs to existing joinery.
Complete kitchens from survey and drawings through manufacture to installation, in painted timber, oak, walnut, ash or veneered panel, with worktop heights set to the people who will use them and internal fittings sized to what you actually own. Appliances are integrated properly, ventilation is planned rather than improvised, and the drawings are revised with you until the layout is right, because changes on paper cost nothing.
Work areas built into kitchens, living rooms, hallways and bedrooms, with the screen away from steam and glare, cable routes and sockets concealed within the joinery, drawers for the paperwork and doors or a roll-front to close the whole thing at the end of the day. For shared households we build two positions that do not face each other, which sounds trivial and turns out to matter enormously.
Solid timber worktops in oak, walnut, iroko and ash, templated and made in our workshop with the joints, drainer grooves and sink cut-outs done properly, oiled before installation and easily sanded back after a decade of use. Where stone, composite or steel is the better answer we say so, template for it and coordinate the supplier, since a timber worktop next to a busy sink is a decision that deserves an honest conversation.
Wardrobes, bookcases, understairs cupboards, entrance joinery, laundry cabinets and window seats, built to the same standard and finishes as the kitchen so a whole apartment reads as one piece of work. Awkward geometry is where this pays most: sloping attic ceilings, curved walls, deep window reveals and the strange voids that old buildings contain, all of which become storage instead of remaining apologies.
Kitchens for apartments of thirty and forty square metres where every millimetre counts: reduced-depth cabinets that still take a plate, tall narrow pull-outs, tables that fold from a cabinet, appliance choices that suit the space, and a work surface that can become a desk within seconds. Access matters too, so everything is designed to fit through the doors and lifts of buildings never intended for delivered furniture.
Existing kitchens altered for a new appliance or a moved wall, doors and drawer fronts remade in a new finish over sound carcasses, hinges and runners replaced, worktops renewed and inherited joinery repaired. Where a kitchen is only tired rather than wrong, refacing it costs a fraction of replacement and keeps a great deal of material out of a skip. We will tell you plainly which of the two your kitchen needs.
Contacts
Send photographs of the room, rough dimensions and a description of what is not working about the current arrangement, and we will give a realistic price band before visiting. The measured survey and first drawings follow once you are comfortable with the range.
Lead time from approved drawings to installation is usually seven to nine weeks.
Workshop12 Via Nizza, 10126 Torino, Italy
Phone+39 011 65 38 42
Emailfalegnameriasereno@live.com
Workshop hoursMonday–Friday 08:00–18:00, Saturday 09:00–13:00