RETAILER PROFILE | Holte


A kitchen project by the Holte team


The Holte studio in Hackney, London, features a working kitchen for events


Call a Holte to high prices and emissions


Fiona and Tom Ginnett, the owners of Hackney- based kitchen studio Holte, are trying to educate consumers and the wider industry, on sustainability through design. Rebecca Nottingham went to meet them to find out more…


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ou don’t have to be on a mission to save the planet yourself to realise that sustainability is a hugely important


issue that’s impacting both our professional and personal lives in a variety of ways. One company that is trying to make a tangible difference is London-based studio Holte, who are not only challenging their customers, but the industry as a whole, to change their priorities when it comes to buying and designing a kitchen. With 20 years’ collective experience in architecture and fashion respectively, designers Tom and Fiona Ginnett founded Witlof in 2013, designing, manu- facturing, and installing luxury, bespoke fitted kitchens. The launch of Holte followed in late 2017, born out of a desire to bring “good design and high- quality materials to everyone”.


The team at Holte design and manufacture a full kitchen system, including hand-finished fronts and cabinets that can be combined with proprietary carcasses – predominantly Ikea – bringing what the husband-and-wife team describe as a “high-quality but accessible designer finish to any kitchen”. “The idea for the Holte side of the business came from the fact that we had a lot of people interested in the style and ethos of our Witlof kitchens, but they didn’t necessarily have the budget,” explains Holte


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co-founder Fiona Ginnett. “We identified a gap in the market between where bespoke starts and where high street ends and decided to build a business that focuses on kitchens that offer a unique finish at a more affordable price point.”


Keen to understand the full impact of their industry on the environment, last year the Ginnetts embarked on a project whereby they began calculating the carbon footprint of their kitchens for clients.


“When planning a fitted kitchen, most of us think in three dimensions: height x width x depth,” Fiona says. “We believe there is a fourth dimension that should be equally important – environmental impact. We believe we are the only kitchen design studio to calculate the exact CO2e impact of all our products. This unique insight helps lower our emissions as we continue


to refine our materials and manufacturing processes.”


Investing in Målbar, a Danish carbon calculator tool, Holte has spent months generating a full set of hard CO2e data for every Holte- made component, such as door fronts, bespoke cabinetry and handles in its range, in a bid to calculate the environmental cost of each one of its modern fitted kitchens. The data does not include worktops and carcasses.


The company even invested in a sustainability analyst to collate the data and create a library of information. These figures represent an average (see boxout on right), as the precise impact will depend on the specific products chosen – there is an emissions difference of around 40% between Holte’s worst- performing product and its best. “The data was eye-opening,” says Fiona. “We had long been aware that the impact of our products on the environment must be significant, but our interaction with the CO2e emissions of products was limited as not many businesses have done it. When we started calculating our products’ full-lifespan emissions, it became clear that the impact of a whole kitchen is huge – a single cabinet door can generate the same emissions as 120 hours of Netflix or 92km in a car.” The couple readily admit that the impact of a business is not limited to carbon emissions, however as a producer of kitchens, it is, they say, the main issue they are contributing to. “It’s important to point out that we are not claiming to produce or sell the most sustainable products,” Tom Ginnett explains. “But what we are doing is providing our clients with the information and the comparable values of the impact – such as how many coffees/air miles it’s equivalent to etc – each product individually or as a whole has on the environment, so they know what they need to do to offset that if they so wish.”


As a result of the project, Holte has overhauled a number of practices and production methods to reduce emissions – and is looking for ways to do more. “Small decisions across the board make a big difference,”


explains Fiona. “We use a broad


spectrum of materials and products chosen for their sustainable credentials and durability and what we know will appeal to our customers.


“For example, we use Valchromat, which is essentially like MDF but it’s incredibly dense and dyed with organic dye. They also use organic resin, so it’s fully recyclable. Our laminates are from Italian brand Arpa, which we chose because they are manufactured using 50% natural resin.”


They have also brought the manufacture of components previously produced in China, back to the UK and have been liaising with manufacturers to encourage more sustainable production practices and more efficient waste streams. Although the Ginnetts’ focus on sus - tainability really took off in 2021, as Fiona explains, the basic philosophy of


· June 2022


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