Cosentino and Riva 1920 Team Up for the Ultimate, Swiss Army Knife Vanity

DeKauri, a freestanding sink-and-vanity unit by Cosentino and Riva 1920 that turned heads at the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show in January—and is sure to turn more at Salone del Mobile this month—is a study in contrasts. Bringing together hip Brooklyn-made lighting, classic Italian furniture, a Naoto Fukasawa–designed fixture, a Dekton surface, and 50,000-year-old Kauri wood, the unit is an all-in-one, statement-making piece. One of the project’s main pleasures, says DeKauri’s designer, Daniel Germani, was its ability to integrate high-tech products with heirloom-quality craftsmanship.

And no detail here has been neglected. DeKauri’s double-doored exterior is made of bog-harvested Kauri wood from New Zealand—a millennia-old material renowned for its luminous quality. Once opened, the cabinet reveals mirror-framing LED surface-mount lighting by Juniper, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer. Narrow wooden built-ins line the side panels, providing storage for cosmetics or other sink-side necessities. The basin is a modest, rectilinear design from Dekton.

For the unit’s hardware, Germani selected the über-sleek Aboutwater collection, a collaboration between Boffi and Fantini. The subdued form of the faucet—AF/21 by Fukasawa—is in keeping with the designer’s signature elemental style.

Aside from its dreamy material lineup, DeKauri presents an opportunity for a bathroom sink to be placed outside the washroom. The inspiration for the piece, Germani says, derived from the typology of the credenza: the elegant, often highly decorative sideboard that has been a fixture in Italian homes since the Middle Ages.

“It makes us rethink how we see bathroom organization,” says Germani. “I can easily envision this in an open-concept bedroom where the sleeping space and the bath flow into one another.”

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