The Smoke and Brass kitchen designed by Kelly Wearstler
Interior design legend Kelly Wearstler’s latest collaboration is with JennAir, the trailblazing Benton Harbor, Michigan-based appliance company that invented the first self-ventilated downdraft range.
The partnership creates a virtual kitchen concept centered around the brand’s new limited edition range, Smoke and Brass, along with other JennAir products, including its obsidian black Columns.
The virtual kitchen concept marries the statement-making appliances with colors, finishes and materials selected by Wearstler to showcase how modern luxury design can be truly personalized and one-of-a-kind.
“My studio is always evolving and changing with the design industry,” Wearstler says. “Virtual design is really disrupting tradition and providing an incredible medium for experimentation and development. It allows us to envision spaces in ways we never thought possible and can be a standalone art in itself. It is a great resource to bend the possible into the extraordinary, like with the future kitchen concept. When it came to designing the dream kitchen for JennAir, we wanted to harness virtual design to rethink this space within the home. It allowed us the freedom to envision a kitchen designed around the soulfulness of JennAir’s limited edition professional-style range Smoke & Brass. We could be really bold in our material choices and their implementation in this space.”
The Smoke & Brass limited edition statement piece is a 48-inch professional-style range that features an artistically applied smoke color finish with warm undertones, liquid bronze and opaque smoke that create depth on a traditionally bright, polished surface. The design also features the JennAir Column refrigerator, known for its striking obsidian black interior and solid glass metal materials illuminated by touch controls. This refrigerator breaks the design mold with up to 250 configurations available.
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“At JennAir, we design our products so that visionaries like Kelly Wearstler can design outside the lines, bringing any vision of luxury to life,” says Chelsey Whitehead, JennAir’s product and brand marketing director. “Collaborating with someone as revered in the design industry as Kelly allows us to showcase further that our limited edition statement pieces give designers the ability to create unique, luxurious, and ownable spaces. Kelly’s design captured the artistic elements of the Smoke & Brass to truly present it as a piece of art.”
Wearstler agrees.
“The kitchen concept created for JennAir is designed to be unique to Smoke &Brass, which is crafted in luxurious materials that make it an art piece in itself,” she says. “JennAir masterfully blurs the line between functional appliances and art. Their luxury appliances allow designers to create spaces that are uniquely personal without sacrificing function.”
With colors and finishes inspired by the Smoke &Brass range, blackened bronze and burnished brass hues repeat throughout the space. Wearstler pulled the range’s artful balance of light and dark into the kitchen’s design through natural stone and wood in grey and desaturated green hues. Making the JennAir Range the kitchen’s focal point from every angle, her approach to luxury interior design tells the visual story that JennAir statement pieces were meant to be designed for and around.
“As a designer, it’s imperative to break the norms and not follow the rules,” Wearstler says. “You should constantly be challenging the status quo. To do so, you have to be open to exploring and learning new things, pushing the boundaries and imagining something entirely new and unexpected.”
