House style

Straight lines are so last year, and now kitchen design is following this glamorous aesthetic

Curves in all the right places

IF THERE IS ONE THING that has characterised the mood in interiors this year, it’s curves. Crescent-shaped sofas, oval tables, round mirrors and spherical lighting were a feature of both the Milan Furniture Fair in April and last month’s London Design Festival, and are already filtering into both designer and high-street furniture collections. Curves haven’t, until now, been a motif that has translated into kitchen design, but The Rise, a new collection by kitchen company John Lewis of Hungerford and interior-design duo 2LG Studio, might be about to change that.

2LG – aka Jordan Cluroe and Russell Whitehead, who set up their studio in 2014 after Cluroe appeared on the BBC’S Great Interior Design Challenge – started working with John Lewis of Hungerford earlier this year on a design for their Victorian house in south-east London. Aiming for a style that would ‘disrupt the norm’ and contrast with the period architecture of the house, they requested arched cabinets – a technical challenge for the cabinetmakers that they resolved by sandwiching 3mm-thick layers of wood between ‘formers’ (solid crescent-shaped pieces of wood) to bend them into shape. Various appliances are concealed within the cabinetry to create a seamless finish, including a dishwasher that opens automatically when you knock on the door.

The result – painted here in Threadneedle by Mylands – is a far softer and more glamorous look than the straight lines of conventional kitchen design, and one that works well in a high-ceilinged space. The cabinets come as part of a fitted kitchen or can be free-standing, with fluted-glass doors for displaying china and glassware. Cluroe and Whitehead have teamed theirs with a jesmonite oval dining table made by Olivia Aspinall and tubular lighting they designed for Cameron Design House.

The Rise kitchen starts from £35,000; free-standing cabinets cost £6,750 each ( john-lewis.co.uk)

Top Russell Whitehead (left) and Jordan Cluroe. Above The Rise kitchen in the designers’ London home