Kitchen designer Charlie Smallbone has collaborated with deVOL kitchens to produce a garden design for the 2018 Chelsea Flower Show.
Designed and made in six weeks, the kitchen features a rock garden, a Caulfield Company conservatory, and the kitchen designed by Charlie Smallbone and deVOL.
Smallbone said: “So, for this collaboration, it is basically a case that deVOL and I met last year, by chance, but immediately we struck up a great rapport. So, when Mark Caulfield, whose conservatory we are standing in now, called me up as he got a space at Chelsea and said ‘can you do me a kitchen?’ I immediately thought of deVOL.”
The kitchen is called ‘Elemental’ and features copper surfaces and cabinet doors combined with the white marble, which contrasts with the dark blue counters.
The appliances, including a Wolf toaster and Sub-Zero Wolf fridge, are all functional. The worktops are made from a white marble and on the back wall is deVOL’s Arabescato marble sink with copper taps.
According to Smallbone, it is the copper accents and doors that make people want to enter the stand.
“So, we have really created something, which is really a combination of me – in terms of my design ideas and shapes of the cabinets, the beams that go down to create the six-panel effect on the doors, the proportionality aspects. Then utilising deVOL’s beautiful materials and their true artisan spirit and this is the result,” says Smallbone.
The wood is strained, not painted, to make sure that the wood effect is still visible. The aged copper door, if installed in a home, will age and change colour over time.
Paul O’Leary, founder of deVOL Kitchens, said: “The design of the elemental range has taken us about six weeks in total. Charlie and Sue Smallbone have both been influential in the final look and our meetings are friendly, but focused and we get a lot done.”
“There are a handful of key players at deVOL that I bring in to the design process and we all sit around a table with biros and we do our thing; that magical process of dreaming up ideas, identifying issues and finding solutions to problems, and doing it with style.”
The stand, which is on at PW244, won a three-star Royal Horticultural Society Tradestand award and will be available to view until May 26.
Listen to the whole conversation between kbbreview’s Vicki Evans and Charlie Smallbone below:
What was the design inspiration for the kitchen?
What is your favourite part of the kitchen?