Dancing Grid Kitchen Graphs Out Utility One Tile at a Time

Aug 10, 2023

Designing a kitchen requires a practical approach, one emphasizing productivity and utility, considerations akin to a well designed home office or thoughtfully planned garage workshop. They also need to operate similarly to a well organized closet, offering ample and accessible storage. And increasingly, kitchens are also where friends and family just hangout all throughout the day, becoming the de facto “living room” of the home, so they need to look and feel good. That’s a lot to ask of a single space. These considerations are all addressed by SWNA’s Dancing Grid, a modular kitchen system incorporating six different functional tiles to grid out various forms and functions across vertical and horizontal planes. And attractively so.

Designed for Liberal Office, the Dancing Grid wall shelf’s various sized and shaped tiles are each shaped to fit into a wall panel organization system. Sectioned into customizable storage functions, 3D-printed kitchen accessory modules lock into place to offer a seemingly infinite amount of storage options, allowing its owner to move components as needed.

One example is the system’s Hoook tile, a rectilinear component made to overhang either facing upward or downward length-wise. This shallow lipped design only permits the option to hang utensils or secure add-on shelving, but also can be installed with strip LED lighting to illuminate the work surface underneath.

Instead of adding another color, the designers made a subtly angled Shaded tile, creating the semblance of another hue using an interplay of light and shadow across surfaces.

SWNA also designed a larger shape, the In-Out tile. Aesthetically complementary to its smaller tiled siblings, the In-Out tile is designed to curve along the edges of the Dancing Grid kitchen island, offering the option to completely forgo the traditional sink for an all-tile basin (no details how the grout is designed to withstand this sort of kitchen cleaning duty normally tasked to a metal sink).

Like the idea? Many of the functional attributes of the Dancing Grid kitchen can be found in a real life counterpart, IKEA’s SUNNERSTA series. It’s a good thing because SWNA’s modular kitchen tile system is only a TBA concept.

Gregory Han is the Managing Editor of Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.

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