Sink Rethink: Franke's Innovative New Chef Center

When is a sink not a sink? When it’s Franke’s new game-changing Chef Center.

Never happy with the status quo of things, Franke – the leading kitchen-systems provider internationally as well as the world’s largest manufacturer of stainless-steel sinks – is always cooking up something innovative. Questions such as ‘How can we do this better?’ and ‘How can we improve people’s lives?’ are their constant bread and butter – and whatever else you can find in the creative cupboard.

Take their popular Frames by Franke system, launched two years ago. Supremely modular and emphatically architectural, it’s the market’s first-ever total product line, allowing architects, planners and other specifiers to frame their kitchen projects according to their exacting professional expectations.

The 2017 edition of ICFF, the New York high-end luxury fair, sees the launch into the North American market of the latest paradigm-shifting concepts from Franke’s in-house design team – with all the consideration of quality and performance you’d expect from a brand with Swiss heritage. The super-clever new Chef Center delivers a major rethink of the traditional sink area, with its singular, typological function, transforming it into an operational and entertaining hub within the home.

Franke has long responded to, and at the same time help drive, the user-behavioral shift within the domestic landscape, where kitchens steal a march on the old living room, becoming aspirational, open spaces for socializing – the multi-functional, living kitchen, as it were. The Chef Center, with its meticulous design and engineering, dovetails precisely with this trend, enabling it to develop even further.

In short, Franke brings open-concept and multi-functional living to the most basic necessity in your kitchen: the sink. Chef Center delivers seamless workflows, from prep, through cooking and cleaning, to entertaining. Franke has taken the conventional, single-purpose sink for washing dishes and, thanks to its ingenious, integral ledge system and integrated accessories, created unobstructed surfaces and smart layouts that are optimized for a multi-functional space.

A range of custom-fitted accessories sit on the signature integrated ledge system, creating a completely new work surface. Flush with the surrounding sink ledge for architectural purity of line, these various elements – including an exclusive roller mat, cutting board, colander, and drain board – can slide from side to side, depending on the user’s operational needs.

A direct descendent of those revolutionary modernist kitchens of the 1920s, which embraced the latest scientific-management research, Franke’s Chef Center – with its expanded countertop work space – optimizes food preparation. Two integrated, anti-microbial storage compartments sit alongside the sink aperture, delivering multiple functions. During prep, they can be used for holding food scraps, while becoming the ideal place to cool wine during entertaining. Otherwise, they take on the role of storage for cleaning products or even, with a specially designed removable bin, a mini composting unit for food waste, with direct connection to the main drain pipe.

A push-button, remote-controlled strainer basket completes the innovative scheme, which strives to, as the company brand slogan goes, “make it wonderful” – in short, guarantee a superlative user experience. But it’s also a pretty wonderful experience for professionals, too. “Architects and planners can depend on the unique features of the Chef Center from Franke, the leading brand in premium sinks, to meet their clients’ exacting standards,” says Gary Langbo, Franke President Sales & Marketing for North America.

It’s not only about the optical or the tactile, you see. The Chef Center’s handcrafted, premium-quality 18-gauge stainless steel also performs superior sound absorption, thereby minimising dishwashing and disposal noise. “What’s more, it can be combined with any number of our high-quality, Swiss-engineered kitchen faucets,” Langbo explains, “as well as our instant-hot-water and filtered-cold-water systems and soap dispensers.”

As a complete kitchen-prep, clean-up and entertaining system, the Franke Chef Center adds real value to the specification of kitchens that work perfectly for and with their users. It’s everything plus the kitchen sink.

© Architonic