It has ended the eighth edition of the Cristalplant Design Contest, which this year has focused on the issue of kitchen hoods, promoting the competition together with Elica. Ellen Bernhardt, young designer of German origin, stood out among around 2000 participants with a project that succeeded in seizing on one hand the technical and technological peculiarities of Cristalplant Biobased and on the other hand the style of Elica, a company with a well-defined character and culture. Ellen, born in 1982, moved to Milan in 2001 to study with Piero Lissoni and Patricia Viel. After the studies, she collaborated with Carlo Colombo and, in 2008, she founded a design studio with Paola Vella, working for various companies of the furnishing industry. The concept of Sipario, the vertical Cristalplant moulded hood, draws inspiration from the movement of the Italian-style curtain, from which it derives the sinuous and dynamic sign characterizing it, in perfect compliance with Elica’s style and spirit. As a soft fabric drape suddenly descends on the stage of a theatre hiding the noises and the lights during the change of a scene, the design by Ellen Bernhardt remains ideally suspended on the wall to conceal the technological part of the hood and to highlight the most important part of the kitchen, softly lighting up the space.
