Best of Milan: Multi-Use Hubs Rethink the Kitchen

With sinks, dishes, containers, pans, food, and appliances, the kitchen can easily become a cluttered space filled with disparate odds and ends. At Milan Design Week, Caesarstone presented Islands, a new collection by London-based design studio Raw Edges that offers a solution to all the madness.

Viewed on their own, the structures built of Caesarstone's quartz surface material have a strikingly simple form—three panels joined together to form a rudimentary table. But the customizeable units contain voids and cut-outs designed to hold anything from a wash basin to a potted plant. Rather than piling products on top of the traditional kitchen island, users are meant to incorporate Islands into their cooking and cleaning routines. (To showcase the unit's interactivity, Caesarstone presented the collection in a live installation at Palazzo Criveli in Milan with chef Alice Delcourt.)

Here, we look at a variety of possible applications of the unit, as imagined by the Raw Edges and Caesarstone team.