We’ve had a bit of a slow build-up to sunny summer, but I believe we may have finally arrived (it’s 88 and sunny where I sit, and I’m at 7,600 ft.!). Some of the outdoor entertaining products we’ve covered over the last months reflect this gradual move from Spring to Summer. Last February, Calanc’s Outdoor Kitchen started things off with a small, portable unit that housed a mini-fridge and a compact gas range; we followed that up with Fuego’s Modular, a customizable outdoor kitchen that brought all the amenities of indoor cooking out to the patio; and today’s post profiles Electrolux’s latest, an outdoor kitchen designed by landscape architect Jamie Durie.

Electrolux Outdoor Kitchen. Designed by Jamie Durie.

Given Durie’s vocation, it’s fair to say he has a certain bias, so the idea behind the outdoor kitchen is to integrate every component with the natural landscape, resulting in a fully-functional and operator-friendly cooking space that appears to have emerged–like so many flowers and shrubs–from the very garden it inhabits. Durie’s kitchen is custom designed from modular components. The expansive, eco-friendly countertops incorporate an Electrolux barbecue and burner, as well as dividing niches that work for additional storage or (Durie’s suggestion) live plantings. Other features are a wooden bar/bench, an integrated cutting board, and Durie’s signature decorative flourish–an ashen tree whose expansive branches seem to be threading the empty space between dividing niche and cutting board.

Designer Durie hails from Australia, where, in addition to practicing horticulture and landscape design, he’s a renowned t.v. personality known for extolling the virtues of communing with nature via the easy conduit of a well-designed outdoor room. His hope for the outdoor kitchen is that it encourage people to re-think the indoor “kitchen congregation” phenomenon by displacing that very space: “The Outdoor Kitchen is an engineered green entertaining area designed to meet contemporary life; it is not just a piece of furniture or a utilitarian space–it's an outdoor area designed to draw people out of their houses and into their gardens.”

Via Trendir.