About the studio

The MCx design studio

MCx is the design studio at the heart of Modern Cooking — a collaborative project where we design kitchen knives hand in hand with the makers we admire most, as seriously as any piece of modern design. Each line is an ongoing collaboration built on a shared design language and the values we return to again and again: performance above all, precision craftsmanship, premium materials, and a modernist's restraint where nothing is present that doesn't earn its place. These are true partnerships — the makers work under their own names and shape every piece alongside us, each of us bringing what we do best to the bench. Each line evolves over time, released in small, limited editions. Join the waitlist and we'll invite you, in order, as each new edition is ready.

Made in collaboration. Built to perform. Released in limited numbers.

Explore the lines The case for collaboration ↓

The case for collaborative design

Why the best knives are made together.

A great kitchen knife asks for mastery in many directions at once — the steel and how it's treated, the geometry of the grind, the profile of the blade, the feel of the handle in the hand.

The single-maker tradition asks one person to be world-class at all of it, and many of the makers we work with are exactly that: complete makers who could build the whole knife alone. But every maker has a discipline they love most — and something special happens when people who share the same obsessions decide to build together.

That's what MCx is for. We bring together makers whose values already align — performance first, precision, premium materials, and a quiet, considered restraint — and give them a project to share. Each brings what they do best, but the knife that results is never a sum of parts. It's a single object, designed as one.

Shared values, not a division of labour, are what unlock the next level.

What the studio does

Four ways we're in the work.

Every line takes its cue from somewhere different, and the aim is almost always to make something that doesn't yet exist. But it all comes back to one thing — relationship. A shared perspective on design, process and performance is what makes a collaboration work; the rest is how we turn that into a knife.

01

The relationship

A line starts with people, not parts. We bring together makers whose thinking about design, process and performance already rhymes — then build something new on top of what they share. The pairing works because of how they think, not because we've matched one feature to another.

In practice

Oel × Kamon began with a shared sensibility — performance above all, finished with restraint. Kamon forges, Märtens builds the takedown, but the design is one conversation between the two makers and us — three people who approach a knife the same way.

02

The materials

We chase materials in service of an idea, not the other way around. We source steels and timbers the makers might not reach for alone, and carry the risk of buying them — always in pursuit of the specific knife the line is trying to become.

In practice

Damasteel for Jonas Johnsson and Hangler; Australian timbers — red river gum, gidgee — chosen with the makers because they belong to the story the line is telling, not because they were on hand.

03

The geometry

Good geometry isn't one person's opinion — to assume any of us knows best would be arrogant. It's closer to a consensus, reached over time through years in the kitchen and conversations with makers, chefs and enthusiasts. We translate it into what each curve, radius, bevel and edge actually does: board feel, cutting performance, and the tasks a knife is built to do well.

In practice

With a line partner, geometry is discussed in terms of the knife we're setting out to make and how it's meant to be used — not whose profile wins. The shared standard came first; each batch is built to honour it.

04

The components

When the thing a line needs doesn't exist, we design it. Handles, hardware, fit systems — drawn in the studio, then built by the makers who can build them properly, under their names as well as ours.

In practice

Components developed in-house to realise an idea none of us could buy off the shelf — created because the line called for it, then executed in the makers' workshops.

Inside the studio

A perspective drawn from several directions at once.

The MCx design studio is grounded in professional kitchen experience — a trained chef's understanding of the work a knife has to do, hour after hour, on the board — but it reaches well beyond the pass.

It carries real depth in manufacturing, from running complex production businesses to hands-on fluency with CAD and the machines and tooling used to make kitchen knives and much else. And it's rooted in more than a decade in the handmade knife world: time spent in the workshops of the makers we represent, making knives first-hand, and exposure to more knives, from more makers, than most will ever handle.

That mix lets the studio meet each maker as a peer — speaking their language at the forge and the grinder, while holding every decision up against how the knife will actually perform in a working kitchen.

We're a collaborative design studio, not a director. The makers work under their own names, and their hand is in everything.

The method

From brief to batch.

One design at a time

01

The pairing

A team we believe in — one maker, or more, whose philosophies rhyme.

02

The brief

Shape, steel, timber, intent — agreed together.

03

Prototype

We cook with it. Notes go back. Geometry moves until it's right.

04

The batch

One design, built around ten times. Then never again.

05

The release

Offered to the line's waitlist first, in signup order. Always.

Design principles

Good design is a collective act.

Modern Cooking began with a conviction: that the best design doesn't happen in isolation. It happens between people.

Watching what could emerge between friends and like-minded makers — the ideas that only appear when two perspectives meet — is what inspired MCx in the first place. Connection and relationship aren't soft additions to the work; they are the engine of it.

That belief sits inside a longer tradition. When you study industrial design, what strikes you is how often the everyday object is held up not only as useful but as genuinely beautiful — worthy of the same attention we give to art.

The tradition

When the everyday object becomes art.

After the Museum of Modern Art

Bialetti Moka Express

1933 · MoMA collection

Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA

Eames Lounge Chair

1956 · MoMA collection

Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA

iMac

1998 · MoMA collection

Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art has made this case for nearly a century, collecting objects most people would walk past without a second thought — a Moka pot, a lounge chair, a translucent computer. As MoMA puts it, "good design depends on the harmony established between the form of an object and its use"; to enter the collection, an object must be both beautiful and useful. A kitchen knife, made well, belongs in exactly that conversation.

The Bauhaus understood that such objects are rarely the work of one hand. Its workshops were deliberately co-led — a master of craft beside a master of form — in pursuit of what Walter Gropius called "art and technology, a new unity."

Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future.
Walter Gropius · Bauhaus manifesto, 1919

Where it gets sharp

But collaboration is not the same as agreement. The most interesting work tends to come from the tension between people rather than the comfort of consensus.

The most interesting ideas come from friction. A crucible purifies and homogenises steel through heat and pressure — debate does the same for a design. The push and pull of a good disagreement burns off what's weak and leaves something truer behind.
Peter · Modern Cooking

This is how we work. We bring together makers we trust and admire, we argue well and openly, and we let that friction refine the object until only what's essential remains — performance first, beauty as its natural consequence, and a knife that could only have come from the conversation that made it.

Current contributors