Living Crystal: Scavolini's Glass Kitchen, Patterned by Karim Rashid

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Most "designer kitchen" marketing means a name licensed onto an otherwise ordinary product. Scavolini's Living Crystal collection (also sold as simply Crystal) is a real case of a named designer actually shaping the product: Italian manufacturer Scavolini commissioned Karim Rashid to design a set of graffiti-inspired decorative patterns specifically for the collection's glass door fronts.

The company behind it

Scavolini was founded in 1961 in Pesaro, Italy, by brothers Valter and Elvino Scavolini, starting as a small artisan kitchen workshop. It grew fast enough that by 1984 it had become the number-one kitchen furniture manufacturer in Italy by market share, a position built on real industrial scale rather than boutique output. In 1996 the company launched a second, more upscale brand, ernestomeda, and has since expanded from kitchens into bathroom and living-room furniture — Living Crystal itself reflects that living-room-adjacent ambition, since its glass-and-colour approach is explicitly designed to work as a visible, decorative wall element rather than disappear into the kitchen the way cabinetry traditionally does.

Scavolini's name reached well beyond kitchen showrooms in Italy, too: from 1975 to 2014, the company sponsored the professional basketball club Victoria Libertas Pesaro, which was known across Europe simply as "Scavolini Pesaro" for nearly four decades — co-founder Valter Scavolini served as the club's president during part of that run. That's a genuinely long, real sponsorship relationship, not a one-season marketing spend, and it's part of why Scavolini became a household name in Italy well beyond anyone actually shopping for a kitchen.

What the collection actually is

Living Crystal's doors are built from tempered glass set into an aluminium frame, rather than the painted timber or laminate most kitchen doors use. That construction is what makes the collection's colour range possible: the glass gives genuine depth and reflection rather than a flat painted surface, available in bold tones including tangerine and eggplant alongside a metallic "Leaf Gold" finish, plus solid-colour variants named Flexus (green) and Karikon (white).

The designer Scavolini actually brought in

Karim Rashid is a genuinely major figure in contemporary industrial design, not a licensing exercise. Born in Cairo in 1960 and raised in Canada, he earned a degree in industrial design from Carleton University in 1982, then studied in Milan and Naples under Ettore Sottsass — the architect behind the Memphis Group and one of the most significant names in 20th-century Italian design — before opening his own New York studio in 1993. Rashid has since put more than 4,000 designs into production across 47 countries and won upward of 400 international design awards, working for companies as varied as Alessi, Samsung, Citibank, Veuve Clicquot and Sony Ericsson. His work sits in the permanent collections of fourteen museums, including MoMA in New York, SFMOMA and the Centre Pompidou in Paris — real institutional recognition, not just industry-award volume. He's best known for fluid, curved "biobject" designs like the Garbo wastebasket for Umbra, a genuine best-seller that shows up in design-history surveys of accessible, mass-market industrial design.

For Living Crystal, Rashid's contribution was a set of graffiti-inspired decorative textures applied to the glass door fronts — a genuinely unusual brief for a kitchen manufacturer, treating cabinet doors as a surface for real applied art rather than a background material. It fits his broader body of work, which has always leaned toward colour and organic pattern over the restrained neutrals most kitchen design defaults to — the same instinct behind his best-known pieces, expressed here on a much larger, room-defining scale rather than a single object on a shelf.

Living Crystal dates from Scavolini's catalogue in the early-to-mid 2010s, and doesn't appear prominently in the company's current range — the honest read is that it's a design from a specific period rather than a permanent fixture of the line, the way a fashion-house collaboration is often a moment rather than an ongoing product. Original units still turn up on the secondhand and ex-display market for buyers who want the specific Rashid patterns rather than Scavolini's current catalogue.

For other real design collaborations built around unconventional materials rather than paint or laminate, see our pieces on FIAM's Ghost chair, cut from a single sheet of curved glass, and Visionnaire's Branko chandelier, built from 166 stainless steel knives.