Casamenu is a creative studio specialised in telling the story of the kitchen, set up by photographer Cristina Galliena Bohman and architect Francesca Martinez.

Their business involves providing photography for online and offline use, carrying out interviews and organising custom events on behalf of companies. To support offline business, they created a Journal, its content curated by the Casamenu team, which aims to give exposure to companies in the sector planning to invest in digital communication.

Because the kitchen is more than just cooking and, even beyond the plate, taste plays a part.

Here's the founders’ perspective

What do you mean by “telling the story of the kitchen,” i.e., “Bring life into the kitchen”?

Bring life into the kitchen is our motto, which describes our vision of telling the story of the kitchen: the warm, intimate heart that daily family life revolves around.

After photographing and interviewing several guests, we realised that what really makes an atmosphere is the person who lives there. That’s why the kitchens featured on Casamenu are all vastly different from each other and greatly reflect their inhabitants, who have personalised them, thereby making them unique. 

Design follows the person, not the other way around.

Bring life into the kitchen is also an invitation to think of the kitchen as a place that’s full of life, even in institutional and representative contexts such as showrooms, exhibition stands, websites, social media and adverts by companies in the sector, in line with the image a company thinks is most suitable for them.

Rather than a computer-generated representation, in which humans are practically absent and the kitchens are presented as stunning art installations, we prefer to take a more direct approach, in which you experience life, not a set. 

We are not for perfection at all costs and at Casamenu we try to inspire readers and professionals by opening a dialogue on their relationship with their kitchen, to understand, in addition to their tastes, what they need and how they experience this space that everyone, absolutely everyone, has chosen as their central room. 

What does your work involve?

Our creative studio is based in Milan, and we largely deal with photography, videos and styling. We specialise in creating content for the kitchen industry's digital communication, placing people and design at the heart of our work. 

On our website we have published about thirty guests with an entire section, Kitchen, dedicated to them, while on Instagram we try to blend works we have produced with a selection of kitchens with a visual impact so strong they can evoke the day-to-day life of their owners, thus creating an inspirational database.

During the pandemic, we also created Kitchen Mini Stories: a series of video interviews that enabled us to keep in touch with guests who don't live in Milan and we haven't had the chance to meet and visit in person yet. It was great to see how enthusiastically they were accepted and how hard they worked to shoot the videos with our remote direction.

What item or element can a kitchen never do without?

There's only one thing a kitchen can never do without: personalisation. There are people who love technology and people who prefer to do everything by hand, people who love colour and people who only want white and neutral colours, people looking for function and people looking for charm. 

The kitchens we’ve visited so far are a mix of newness and nostalgia, so much so that we always ask our guests’ favourite item is and what they couldn’t do without, and we get highly varied responses. Memories are the emotional, private part of the home, the part that gives its spaces uniqueness, and they relate to either a person’s family or their travels or passions. Obviously, the must-have items are the ones that make life in the kitchen easier, so all things technological, from food processors to dishwashers to indestructible countertops.

Although, what comes up most in what our guests need has more to do with the space than the objects, and that’s both light and a view nature and an outdoor space. And we agree!