Restart: Arclinea

As with every company, it’s been a little quieter at Arclinea in the last few months, but now the production facilities at the Vincenza HQ have sprung back into life. The Arclinea team have never been more dedicated to creating the exceptional kitchens for which they have become internationally known. Right now, they are busy building the New Arclinea range – shown initially in 2018 and now ready to take centre stage in houses all over the world.

This family business has rarely taken a break since Silvio Fortuna set up his wood workshop in Caldogno in 1925. With his wife running the local trattoria, the Fortuna family was deeply attached to food and hospitality. No surprise then, that in 1960, Silvio and his sons Almerino, Angelo and Lena, decided to focus uniquely on the kitchen, and chose the name Arclinea for this new direction. ‘From this point, 60 years ago, the company ethos has been about the pleasure of living, combining function and warmth,’ says Marillina Fortuna, who is in charge of Marketing and Communication at Arclinea. ‘Because it’s a family business, we’ve been able to evolve without losing our roots in any way.’

Steady investment in new materials, combined with research into changes in lifestyle has kept Arclinea at the cutting edge: desirable, functional and contemporary. While the development and application of new technologies, though rarely conspicuously on show, ensure that Arclinea products are leaders in their field. (You want the very best extraction system? This is where to find it.)

The kitchen has never been a more important part of the home than it is today. It is the focal point of domestic sociability; the gathering place for family and friends congregating around the sheer pleasure of food. But today’s kitchen is not just the beating heart of daily life, it is also the high design epicentre of the home.

As the significance of the kitchen has evolved decade by decade, the Fortuna family has not just kept abreast of change, but been instrumental in making it happen. As far back as 1978, they published a recipe book – in the days before the genre was a best-selling one – of regional Italian specialities. A year earlier, Almerino Fortuna had already devised Punto + Linea, a groundbreaking system whose furniture-like qualities connected the kitchen directly to the rest of the home.

Arcilinea introduced the Functional Island; the first kitchens that used materials derived from their professional counterparts; and kitchens that disappeared into cupboards, such as the New Pocket System. Such innovation has kept them ahead of the competition.

This is in part thanks to the creative direction of the celebrated Italian architect Antonio Citterio, who first worked with Arclinea in 1986. While his designs might appear minimal, the detail is to be found in fine finishing and hand-worked parts, from the vintage steel doors of the Convivium range, hand-polished to create a softer look, to the Beta door where refined stucco speaks of both Italy and tradition while contributing to a thoroughly contemporary feeling. ‘Citterio,’ says Marillina Fortuna, ‘has brought an architectonic matrix that defines every part of Arclinea’s design process.’

And as with the best of all Italian design, it is the combination of tradition and the modern that makes Arclinea kitchens so very relevant in the contemporary home. (It’s perhaps not at all surprising that the company were commissioned to create all the kitchens at the Italian ambassador’s residence in Washington DC when it was remodelled in 2007.)

Just under a year ago, in July 2019, Arclinea delivered another first: this time a new, 800-square-metre exhibition space, also in Caldogno, where its creations truly come alive. There are classrooms training areas, and an unparalleled display of Arcilinea’s revolutionary development of the now-classic Functional Island; You can see the sharing kitchen, hidden kitchens and discreet systems for the perfectly calibrated storage of wine. It is, in fact, a kitchen wonderland. Like Arclinea, it is unique.


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