20 years of Slide&Hide®: How Neff rewrote the rules of kitchen design

Once marginalised as a secondary, purely functional space, kitchens have come to take centre stage in our homes. Our early, more affluent 20th-century forebears may have treasured formal dining rooms, but later generations sidelined these in favour of a multifunctional room where household members love to hang out or entertain guests in an inviting setting. Yet, affectionately referred to now as the heart of the home, kitchens depend on efficient, space-saving appliances to optimise this conviviality.

Kitchen design greatly benefited from the advent of the first fitted version, dreamt up in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for the New Frankfurt housing programme. German architect Ernst May brought her on board – along with such German starchitects as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius – and her streamlined, space-saving kitchen with built-in units presaged the fitted kitchens we take for granted today. 

Germany has also trailblazed innovative kitchen appliances. Neff, the German high-end manufacturer, founded in 1877, is renowned for its revolutionary designs. This year, the brand celebrates the 20th anniversary of its ingenious Slide&Hide®-Tür oven door, which slides horizontally into a discreet cavity under the oven in one quick, seamless motion.

There are two key advantages to this feature. Firstly, it gives full, unimpeded access to the inside of an oven by offering up an angle of reach previously inaccessible in front of the appliance. And secondly, in contrast to a partially open door, it doesn’t jut out – a boon in compact kitchens where space is limited.

A flash of lateral thinking on the part of Neff’s head of design and an external designer in 2002 gave birth to the Slide&Hide® door. ‘Initially, they presented a life-size prototype made of chipwood and a welded metal frame,’ recounts Ralf Grobleben, Vice-President of Design at Neff. ‘They ran their idea by everyone in our factory in Bretten.’ At this stage, their concept didn’t look too promising, but Neff is always open to new ideas and the two designers eventually convinced the company of the design’s validity.

Despite the product’s obvious advantages, some Neff customers had reservations at first. The Brits in particular needed convincing, remembers Grobleben: ‘No one had seen a  fully retracting oven door before.’ Neff’s response was canny and pragmatic, as Grobleben recalls: ‘We invited British sales colleagues to test cooking a huge turkey in an oven with a Slide&Hide door.’ Now, with over two million homes equipped with Slide&Hide® ovens, it seems all doubts about its efficacy have evaporated. What’s more, it’s been adopted by British TV’s hit show ‘The Great British Bake Off’.

The Slide&Hide® oven underwent several stages of refinement before it reached its present level of sophistication. In 2008, the cavity the door slides into was made smaller, allowing the oven’s interior to be larger. Six years after that, ovens with a Slide&Hide® door incorporated the highly rated, self-cleaning pyrolysis technology; this heats the oven to extremes, burning off food scraps to a cinder that can be wiped off easily.

The door also provides a useful shelf if pulled down to a 90° position, allowing a baking tray to slide on to it in order to check how the food is cooking or add more ingredients. Aesthetic improvements have been made, too: now Slide&Hide® ovens feature graphite grey side strips, making them even more sleek and aesthetically versatile. 

Grobleben emphasises the practicality of Slide&Hide® ovens: ‘They’re a great problem-solver. In a compact kitchen-cum-dining room, it’s useful to have an oven door that doesn’t open out into the space, especially if the oven is just behind a door to the kitchen that opens inwards. Being able to reach easily into the oven is also a major advantage for wheelchair-users.’

The practicality of Slide&Hide® ovens also unleashes culinary creativity. Since food of all kinds can easily be popped into the ovens, Slide&Hide® quite literally opens up the way for endless experimentation – offering not only first-class functionality, but giving free reign to freedom and fun, too.

© Architonic

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