Every few years Italian manufacturers Valcucine and Alessi team up with a renowned designer to create new options in kitchen design. Dutch architect Wiel Arets, who has worked with Alessi for many years as a product designer, launched the latest LaCucinaAlessi kitchen system in Milan this week.

Among the freestanding unit’s most notable features is a generous number of drawers on either side, and rounded corners on all surfaces, to make cleaning easy.

Arets says his unit is not meant to look or feel like a kitchen. “Rooms shouldn’t have just one purpose,” he says. “The kitchen is usually a separate room, but people live differently now. They have smaller apartments and there are fewer wallls between rooms like the living room and the bathroom.”

Called Cook It (for now), the all-Corian kitchen is meant to disappear within the room when everything’s been tucked away.