We’ve seen a lot of new cookware sets that promise beauty and functionality, and, with few exceptions, many of those products manage to deliver on the first, with lovely tools and utensils handmade from all kinds of conscientiously chosen materials—but few also perform better than what’s already on the market. However, a new collection from Uruguayan studio Amueblate marries modular design and the ergonomics of cooking into a set of lapacho and eucalyptus wooden boards and spoons that are as nice to look at as they are to cook with.
Almacén y bazar (or “warehouse and bazaar”) was commissioned by COOK, a Uruguayan company that sells freshly prepared food kits for home cooking, like Blue Apron—if Blue Apron also sent you gorgeous wooden cookware along with those pre-measured vials of vinegar and packets of spices. It’s also a finalist for Salao Design Casa Brasil 2015, a Latin American product design award, and it’s easy to see why.
Designed to fill the gap between “between having modern cookware and artisanal pieces,” Andrea Kac and Herman Schenck of Amueblate “incorporated intuitive gestures natural to everyday cooking into the collection, enhancing the beautiful handmade pieces.”
For example, there are three spoons with different edges—rounded, cornered, and flat—that turn the spoon into a spatula, to get in hard-to-reach edges, or into a blunt chopping tool. The boards, too, can be used for food prep, serving, even as a spice grinder of sorts, if you use the wooden pestle in the mortar-like groove. Also, the boards fit together like puzzle pieces to create a larger surface area on your kitchen counter as you cook, or on your dining table when you serve.
