Spotlight On: Naked Kitchens

New Kid on the Kitchen Block

Modern kitchen design fall into 3 categories:

1) Traditional. Usually handmade and bespoke. Think luxurious woods and inflame design.

2) High Street. Global trends in manufacturing make them cheaper and quicker to produce and more modular: easily changed, altered and replaced. They can be as bland as possible, for resale or tenants, or as trend focused as you like. Ikea is largely responsible for driving demand.

3) Luxury high tech. The space age kitchens with the latest in hands-free sensors and clean, perfectly honed lines. These tend to be the more stylish and sophisticated models, although can can apply to inflame designs too. You’ll always know one by the price tag. They tend to use advanced manufacturing techniques, usually developed for something else (think metal drawer fronts that repel kitchen grease because they use the same finishing techniques as on spaceships for re-entry {true story}).

Naked Kitchens manage to somehow straddle all 3. The more independent, small brands do borrow from all 3 categories, but usually sit in the ‘high street’ or ‘traditional’ bracket as they can run with small overheads and limited workshop space (traditional) or offer limited variations on modular designs for a “bespoke feel” (High Street).

Based in a collection of aeroplane hangers on the Norfolk Broads, Naked Kitchens (and their sister company Norfolk Oak) use high tech machinery (German designed precision cutters) which is operated directly from CAD software. This dramatically speeds up the production time and reduced the labour costs, so they can produce a stunning kitchen that can compete with the likes of John Lewis but for a superior product which is completely bespoke (hello 53.5cm cupboard!). They managed the entire process from wood sourcing to delivery in-house and are fantastic to deal with. We’ve recently used them on our Side Return project and we’re very happy with the result: