Home vegetable stall design

My girlfriend Aura grew up in Italy. She was brought up with vegetables and fruit. As a child, she was thought how to to pick up the ripest tomatoes (smell) and the sweetest melons (smell, look, weight and tap).

She was also supposed to know all different variaties of a tomato and which one to use when (salad, pizza, pasta). With that background, it’s impossible to enjoy a cold and sterile Dutch supermarket so she feels lucky that I understand her need for buying 35 kg of fruit and vegetables a week, at a wonderful Turkish supermarket called Helal et Gida. I have learned to pick the loveliest aubergines and zucchini, how to smell and look at things. How to lift 8 bags up to three flight of stairs weekly…

Aura came up with the idea of a small home vegetable stall and soon after that we started designing. She named it the Frutteria. In Italian you usually call a vegetable shop a fruttivendolo (frutta + vendolo = a seller of fruit); the suffix -eria means that it is a shop so she liked that option more.