We’ve been looking at Faltazi’s concept Ekokook kitchen for several days now, pondering how best to feature it on ChicTip. One our staff editors finally made a comparison that struck a chord with the entire ChicTip team – it’s the Swiss Army knife of green / eco-friendly kitchens.

Apart from its striking and futuristic appearance, Ekokook is a highly compact functional kitchen that comes with an eco-system to optimize storage, growing, recycling, waste management and composting of different organic materials. We love the fact it assumes that in the future we will be more involved in the sorting and control of our own waste, as right now many of us feel a sense of doing our part in simply sorting the card and paper from the cans and plastic. While this current level of participation is commendable, it’s really the bare minimum to prevent the landfill problem getting further out of control.

With that in mind, the creative folks in the Faltazi Lab have been hard at work on a project to help us better manage the precious resources than pass through our hands and our homes. Aesthetically, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re looking at something conceived by Dr. Seuss, but that’s actually incredibly clever marketing, whether by design or not, by the folks at Faltazi. If they were to put out a conceptual kitchen that looked very ordinary, no matter how functional and ground-breaking, it wouldn’t be received with quite the excitement the Ekokook has. Capture the audience’s imagination and you have a very good window in which to state your case. And state it, they do.

Our opinion is that it looks a tad compact for the North American market, where modern kitchens are extravagant affairs that take up lots of floor space, are crammed floor to ceiling with shiny appliances and add significantly to a home’s value. In Europe, and in the residential apartment markets in the U.S., this type of kitchen could gain traction in the near-term, but to get into the mainstream market in this country, they’d need to devise something of grander dimensions.

Hats off to the team at Faltazi, they are addressing critical questions of future consumption and sustainability with compelling conceptual answers. If the kooky-looking Ekokook doesn’t make it to production, we hope at the very least that it serves as inspiration to the kitchen and appliance manufacturers for their future blueprints.

Posted by Keren Fathi-Poor at 18 February, 2010

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