Besides making steel, brass and wood sculptures, Reichardt creates Minimalist designs For more than a decade for Danish design studio Frama: a daybed, a lounge chair, candle holders, a shelving system, and a “very simple” lamp for the Noma restaurant.
Sophie Sharara
Frama passed the first tool on, so Reichardt kept it at home until he found a kitchen tool studio Vercalso in Copenhagen, which makes tools inspired by professional kitchens. For founders Daniel Runge and Christian Lorenzen, it was love at first stick.
We joke about the sheer simplicity of this thing, but Reichardt’s inspiration came, of course, in part from pots found in Asia. Chopsticks, often made of bamboo, have long been used by professional chefs for tasting and sampling in the kitchen.
“I had some chopsticks at home that I used to stir oatmeal in the morning for a few years, and they were too small to do that,” he says. “Then I thought I could make it bigger into a design that could also flip the pancake. In Japan they actually have some fairly large chopsticks, but they still use them in pairs when they stir, and it’s a lot of fun to handle.”
There is more practicality. Wooden utensils can last for decades compared to silicone alternatives (if cleaned and stored properly), and there’s been a lot of discussion lately about how many toxic chemicals regular black plastic spoons may expose users to.
Sophie Sharara
In terms of design, it’s clear that we’ve been heading in this direction for a while, ready to want more, more, less, and less. Joseph Joseph’s simple kitchen tools and stacking bowls have been strangely drawn to us for some time, while Jony Ive has done for computers what his industrial design predecessors, say, did for the famous chairs and lamps.
However, Scandi abstract wooden children’s toys in beige, cream and cool gray can be infuriating. They should be bright red, bright green, and make a lot of noise. And blocky, featureless birth groups we cannot abide by. Ridiculous. They simply take in urine. But I think we can safely say that you can’t get the minimum stick.
As Jeremy White, WIRED’s senior editor, put it: “How can something so ridiculous be so desirable?” Is a stirring stick inherently more masculine than a spoon? More like something Bear Might he throw Carmi Berzato across the kitchen?
“It’s a humble tool. I was surprised by the simple thing of having a stick to stir your food,” Reichardt says with a little laugh. “It brought me back to something… I couldn’t explain it, but it was a nice feeling. “I felt like I was being turned back into a Neanderthal.”