December 21, 2017

Lukstudio Transforms Arda’s Jiaxing HQ Into Immersive Culinary Showroom

Christina Luk opened her namesake firm six years ago, but she has a decade of experience executing hospitality, urban planning, and exhibition-design projects throughout Canada and her native Hong Kong. The Culinary Village, Luk’s showroom for Arda Co., puts her cross-disciplinary sensibility on display alongside the manufacturer’s forward-thinking kitchen appliances.

Luk transformed a 10,800-square-foot floor in the company headquarters into a compound of small structures, including four huts housing “ideal kitchens.” Each has a theme: minimalistic white, total black, rustic country, and modern American. A barrel-vaulted red-brick gallery leads visitors through the evolution of oven technology while the neighboring cooking classroom allows them to whip up dishes of their own on fully functional test appliances.

A barrel-vaulted red-brick gallery exhibits a history of oven technology. Photography by Peter Dixie/Lotan Architectural Photography.

The showroom is accessed via an elegant white-box gallery with two lush green walls and a shallow reflecting pool; a path of stepping stones leads to a tunnel with a witty water feature incorporating dishwasher jets. “Through organizing the series of semi-enclosed kitchens, the project brings water, daylight, and plants into close proximity and evokes memories of wandering in a village,” Luk says. And if that wandering stirs up an appetite, never fear: the VIP lounge, clad in walnut panels and travertine slabs, offers fine dining, the cuisine seasoned with herbs grown in the exterior courtyard.

 

 

The red-brick oven-history gallery resembles an outdoor kiln. Photography by Peter Dixie/Lotan Architectural Photography.
Adjacent to the cooking classroom is a café surrounded by bamboo gardens. Photography by Peter Dixie/Lotan Architectural Photography.
The display kitchens were designed to resemble private residences. Photography by Peter Dixie/Lotan Architectural Photography.
One of the kitchens is an expanse of glossy, minimalist white. Photography by Peter Dixie/Lotan Architectural Photography.
A scale model of the showroom, organized into hutlike pavilions. Photography by Peter Dixie/Lotan Architectural Photography.

> See more from Interior Design’s list of 40 up-and-comers

> See more from the November 2017 issue of Interior Design

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