A design partnership long at home in Beirut, soon with a gallery devoted entirely to it.
For more than four decades, Wakim Group has shaped the way Beirut lives with design. Among the names it has long championed is Valcucine, one of Italy’s most quietly radical makers, a house that has spent its history rethinking what a kitchen can be, and how lightly it can be built.
Crafting Forward, Milan Design Week 2026. Photo © Valentina Sommariva]
An Italian original
Founded in 1980 in Pordenone, the heart of Italy’s so-called Kitchen Valley, Valcucine was the work of four partners led by the designer Gabriele Centazzo. From its earliest years the company treated the kitchen not as furniture but as architecture, engineered around the way people actually move, reach and live.
Today it sits firmly in the high-end segment, present in more than 285 showrooms across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia. Yet it has never traded its founding convictions for scale. Each kitchen is built to last a lifetime, impervious to trend, and that conviction is precisely what drew Wakim Group to the brand.
The Materioteca: glass, wood, stone, lacquer and metal. Photo © Valentina Sommariva]
The art of taking away
At the centre of Valcucine’s thinking is an idea Centazzo calls dematerialisation: removing everything unnecessary until only strength and beauty remain. Its most celebrated expression is the Riciclantica door, built on an aluminium frame just two millimetres thick, the slimmest in the world, using up to 85 percent less material than a conventional door.
The same intelligence runs through every collection. Artematica applies pure, unpaired materials to a single architectural frame; its evolution, Artematica Soft Outline, won the 2022 Good Design Award as the most innovative kitchen in the world.
“We have a dream: a world without waste.” A principle that has guided Valcucine since the 1980s.
Beauty that answers to the planet
Valcucine’s environmental commitment is the spine of its industrial culture. In 1988 it introduced Invitrum, the world’s first kitchen base unit made entirely of glass and aluminium, fully recyclable and producing no waste at the end of its life.
Its glass is endlessly recyclable, its paints are water based, and its units are joined mechanically rather than with adhesives. It is the only kitchen company able to contribute up to twelve LEED credits to a building, and in 2008 its all-glass Artematica entered the permanent collection of MoMA in New York.
A partnership comes home
Valcucine is no newcomer to Beirut. It has been part of the Wakim Group story for years, long before the explosion of August 2020 reshaped the city. Like so much of Saifi and the Beirut Central District, Wakim Group rebuilt, quietly and with intent.
A working gallery, opening later in 2026. Photo © Valentina Sommariva]
Before the close of 2026, that long partnership will settle into the renewed showroom: a working gallery where clients, architects and designers move through complete kitchens, handle the materials, and read the engineering in every detail. Not a beginning, but a continuation.
Valcucine kitchens are available at Wakim Group now, at Georges Haddad Street, Saifi, Beirut Central District. Explore the collections on our Valcucine page or visit the showroom.