We build professional kitchens, and we build them in houses too. It is the same trade we have practised since 1974 — layout, bespoke stainless steel, refrigeration, cooking, dishwash, service — carried into a home, where one thing changes and it changes everything: the kitchen that works cannot be the kitchen you see. Marrone, whose official partner we are, lists private residences among its own markets.
Below is the floor of a house we drew: a three-dimensional model you can walk into. The equipment carries the real dimensions from the catalogues we work with. It shows how we set out a kitchen of this level before it is built, and it is exactly what we send back to anyone who brings us a plan.
Tap the model to enter it, then drag to turn. Two fingers to zoom and pan.
Navigable three-dimensional model of the two kitchens of a villa.
It loads when you get here, so the page opens fast.
The villa in this study does not exist: it is an example we drew ourselves, like the demonstration restaurant, the yacht galley and the hotel kitchen. What the model states precisely is the two kitchens and the way they talk to each other. Structure, building services and permits stay where they belong, on the architect’s desk, and our work fits into theirs.
Why a house at this level has two kitchens
A domestic kitchen, however beautiful, is made for someone cooking for themselves. When there is a cook in the house, and when the table is laid for twenty, that kitchen will not hold: nowhere to keep the cold, nowhere to wash, and above all it sits among the guests. The noise, the steam, the smell of the fryer and the clatter of the plates land exactly where people are having a drink.
That is why the model has two kitchens separated by a wall. In front, the show kitchen: the island, induction hobs flush with the worktop, the stools, the convivial table under the glazing. It is the kitchen you see, and it is where the owner stands with the guests. Behind, the service kitchen: nearly fifty-four square metres, cooking block in the middle under a single hood, cold line and hot line against the north wall, ovens in a column, upright refrigerators, sink and dishwasher. Between the two there is a pass: the plate leaves it and travels four metres.
This is not our invention and it is not an affectation: it is how houses with a brigade are made. The difference is that we draw the service kitchen with the rules of a professional kitchen, not as a fitted store room.
The flow
Whoever works in the house comes in through the staff door, to the west, not through the family door: coat off, whites on. The delivery comes through the same door and goes through the dry store first, which is the filter between outside and the kitchen: boxes are opened there, and cardboard never enters the kitchen. From the store you pass into the kitchen, and from there nothing goes back.
The two cold rooms, one chilled and one frozen, open onto the lobby and not onto the kitchen: in front of the doors there has to be the metre you need to get in with a trolley, and in a three-metre room that metre exists once.
Finished plates leave on the pass towards the show kitchen. For the dining room there is a second door, the waiters’ one; and for the dirty coming back there is a third, at the other end of the same wall, opening straight into the dishwash. Three doors on one wall is not a flourish: whoever carries out does not cross whoever carries back, and the dirty tray never crosses the cooking line.
The outdoor kitchen, under the pergola, is restocked from the show kitchen door: six paces. The bottle store sits behind the wine room wall, so the sommelier takes what is needed without crossing the dining room.
The wine room, and the one thing on this page we have already done
In the model the wine room is a glass room between the dining room and the sitting room: you walk through it to get from one to the other. The refrigerated cabinets stand on the two long walls, mirror-backed, with an LED on the lip of every shelf and the bottles lying at ninety-six millimetre centres, which is the real pitch. The mirror is what makes a cellar look full, and to the eye it changes everything. It has no windows, and that is not an oversight: wine does not want direct light, nor the temperature swing of a south-facing window.
This piece of work is not a study. We have actually installed refrigerated wine cabinets in a private home, in an apartment in the Bosco Verticale in Milan: IGLU cabinets with temperature and humidity control, treated glass and LED lighting. It was a wine room, not a kitchen, and the record is among our projects. The rest of this page is a design, not a delivered job.
The refrigeration plant room, which is the noise you do not hear
At the end of the service strip there is a room houses almost never get drawn: the refrigeration plant room. The condensing units for the cold rooms and for the wine cabinets sit there, in a ventilated room, with the refrigerant lines rising to the header and passing through the wall. The convenient answer is the other one: the unit on board, on top of the cold room or behind the cabinet. It works just as well and costs less, but in a room where people sit and drink you can hear refrigeration.
It is the trade the company was born in, and it is a decision taken on the plan, at the start, not at the end when the walls are up.
Through the eyes of the people who work there
Under the frame there is a list, Through the eyes of. Pick one of the people in the scene — the cook at the cooking block, the chef at the pass, the one in the show kitchen, the dishwasher, the sommelier in the wine room, whoever brings the shopping through the store — and the model puts you in their place, at their height, facing the way they face. From there you walk with the arrow keys, run holding Shift, look around by dragging, and leave with Esc.
It is not an effect. It is how you answer questions that never come to mind in front of a printed plan. Can someone carrying a crate get past the open store door and the counter? Can the cook at the island turn round without hitting the counter behind? Can the people sitting at the island see into the service kitchen when the pass door is open? Every position in the model has at least thirty-one centimetres clear all round, columns and walls included: that is the room a person needs to touch nothing.
Some views
The same views from the model, for anyone who prefers still images.
What we do, from the plan to the handover
Italfrigo Service has worked in professional kitchens and refrigeration since 1974. Layout: reading the space, work flows, keeping clean and dirty apart. Bespoke stainless steel: counters, sinks and cooking blocks welded to drawing, as the official partner of Marrone. Refrigeration: cold rooms, cabinets, wine cabinets and plant rooms, the trade the company was born in. Cooking and dishwash: sizing, installation, commissioning. Islands and counters: worktop at 0.90 m and raised ledge at 1.10 m, which is the right height when someone sits at it. Service: after handover.
In a house the site is not ours: we fit around the architect, the builder and whoever makes the joinery, and often around the family already living there. Our other work is in the projects.
If you have a project under way
Send us a plan of the kitchen area, even a preliminary one, even just a PDF. We send back a model like this one, navigable from a phone, to turn around in a meeting with the architect or with whoever will cook, together with the equipment list and its real dimensions.