Scan Magazine | Design Profile | &SHUFL
Photo: Jonas Danholt
A kitchen with a personal touch Take the structure of an IKEA kitchen and add your own personal touch to make it unique. That is the successful recipe for the kitchen company &SHUFL, the ambition of which is to revolutionise an old-fashioned kitchen industry.
with the final result if they are challenged a bit in the process and forced to think of other alternatives,” says Brems.
By Nicolai Lisberg
One design, plenty of opportunities
For a long time, there were mainly two options when buying a new kitchen. If you had a lot of money, you would go with the custom-made kitchen cabinet solution, and if not, you would go to IKEA and get the affordable one that looked very much like the kitchen at your nextdoor neighbour’s house. “Everything was either really expensive or very white and perhaps a bit dull. I had an IKEA kitchen myself, where I kept the foundation but gave it a makeover with a new surface, new cabinet doors and new drawer fronts, and it changed the way the kitchen looked and felt. It was a different and pretty much unseen way of 30 | Issue 111 | April 2018
giving it a personal touch for a very reasonable price,” says Kristoffer Brems, architect and co-founder of &SHUFL. He founded the company in 2013 together with Lotte Hyldahl, who had heard about Brems’ way of designing his own kitchen, and together they saw an opportunity on the market. “We wanted to challenge a very reactionary and boring kitchen industry, and we still do. We are not afraid of taking risks with our designs and materials, and we also challenge our customers rather than just agreeing with them. From experience, we know that our customers end up twice as happy
In order to help their customers choose the right kitchen, &SHUFL’s architects offer advice and consultancy throughout the entire process. “We don’t just shuffle the IKEA cabinets around with our design, but we shuffle our own materials around as well. The design is in many ways very simple and classic, which allows you to shake things up with a wide range of colours and materials so that you can get the exact look you want,” says Hyldahl. Brems agrees: “Basically, our designs contain plenty of opportunities. We work with different colours, materials and surfaces, but underneath it’s all the same design concept. It’s the same iconic grip,