This new designer kitchen tool is just a stick. Why are we obsessed with it?

In addition to producing steel, brass and wooden sculptures, Richardt has created Minimalist designs For more than a decade for the Danish design studio Frama: a daybed, a lounge chair, candle holders, a shelving system, a “very minimalist” lamp for the Noma restaurant.

Sophie Charara

However, Frama passed on the Tool One, so Richardt kept it at home until he stumbled into the kitchenware studio VEARKAlso in Copenhagen, which makes tools inspired by professional kitchens. For co-founders Daniel Ronge and Christian Lorentzen, it was love on the first floor.

We joke about the sheer simplicity of this thing, but of course Richardt’s inspiration came partly from utensils in Asia. Cooking chopsticks, often made from bamboo, have long been used by professional chefs for tasting and sampling in the kitchen.

“I had some sticks at home that I used to stir my oatmeal in the morning for a few years, and they were a little too small,” he says. “Then I thought I could make it bigger into a design that could also flip a pancake. In Japan they actually have some pretty big chopsticks, but they still use them in pairs when stirring and they’re pretty fun to manage. “

And there is more practicality. Wooden utensils can last decades for silicon alternatives (if cleaned and stored), and there was a a lot of discussion From late on how many toxic chemicals regular black plastic spatulas could expose users to.

Sophie Charara

In design terms, it’s clear that we’ve been heading in this direction for a while, primed to crave less and less of less and less. Minimalist Joseph Joseph kitchen tools and stacking bowls we’ve been strangely drawn to for some time, while Jony Ive has done for computers what his industrial design predecessors did for, say, iconic chairs and lamps.

However, abstract wooden Scandi baby toys in beige, cream and cool gray tones can be quite annoying. They should be bright, light green and make a lot of noise. And blocky, fascinating nativity sentences that we can’t keep. Ridiculous. They just take the piss. But I think we can safely say that you can’t get more minimalist than a stick.

Cable senior editor Jeremy White exclaims, “How can something so ridiculous be so desirable?” Is a touching stick perhaps more macho than a spoon? More like that The bear Carmy Berzatto could throw through a kitchen?

“It is a humble tool. “I was surprised that a stick stirs your food,” Richardt says with a little laughter. “It brought me back to something… I couldn’t explain it, but it was a nice feeling. I somehow felt like I was being transported back to the Neanderthals. “