EDITOR’S COMMENT
August/September 2026
housewareslive.net
Material world I
seem to have spent quite a lot of the past month looking at very nice things.
Not a bad part of the job, admittedly. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited Neutra Kitchens at its new shop
in Putney, spent three days walking what felt like several hundred miles around IFA in Berlin, and headed to the Cotswolds to visit Robert Welch. Three very different trips, but there was actually something connecting all of them: good design. At Neutra Kitchens, it wasn’t about filling the showroom with as much as possible. Quite the opposite. There was a real simplicity to it, with a big emphasis on the materials being used and creating kitchens that felt considered rather than overdone. It was interesting hearing about the thinking behind the showroom and seeing how materials, textures and relatively small details can completely change the feel of a kitchen. A few days later, I was in Berlin for IFA - and admittedly there was
rather more going on there! As you would expect, technology dominated much of the
conversation. AI was absolutely everywhere, alongside smarter appliances and enough new features to keep me busy for considerably longer than the three days I had. But among all the technology, design still mattered. Whether it was a coffee machine, cookware, a vacuum cleaner or one of the many other products fighting for attention across the halls, brands clearly understand that consumers don’t just want something that works. If it’s going to sit in their kitchen or somewhere else around the home, they want to like looking at it too. Then it was off to the Cotswolds to visit Robert Welch.
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go into something that, to the person eventually buying it, might appear incredibly simple. Good design doesn’t necessarily mean adding more. Sometimes it’s knowing what to leave out. It can be the material something is made from, how it feels in your hand, how easy it is to use or simply whether you still want it in your kitchen in 10 or 20 years’ time. That’s particularly important in housewares because so many of the
products we cover are things people interact with every day. There will always be a conversation around price, particularly at the moment, but consumers aren’t buying specifications alone. They’re buying things for their homes, and inevitably that means how something looks, feels and fits into their lives matters. That presents an opportunity too. Online, a product can quite easily become a picture, a price and a list of specifications. Put that same product in someone’s hands, let them feel the weight of it, see the finish properly or understand why a particular material has been chosen, and suddenly there’s much more of a story to tell.
After a month of looking at everything from beautifully simple kitchens in Putney to some of the newest technology in Berlin and British design in the Cotswolds, I’ve certainly been reminded of that. Just don’t tell anyone I spent the last month admiring nice kitchens, coffee machines and cutlery and called it work.
That was a very different experience again. I had the chance to see the company’s design studio and find out more about how products go from an initial idea to something that could eventually end up in kitchens and on dining tables around the world. What particularly struck me there was the amount of thought that can
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