When you furnish your home, buying a kitchen is the most delicate and important moment especially as regards the quality assessment.

Understanding what to choose is crucial since the Kitchen is the most inhabited environment and it is exposed to wear, both for the everyday use, even several times a day, for the environmental characteristics created in a place like this, such as heat, humidity and vapors .

The modern furniture offer endless possibilities for customization, it is therefore essential to know the materials to be used to design them and choose the best ones; one of the aspects to consider carefully is the external finish of all components.

This choice will affect its use and certainly its final price.

Let’s see which are the differences between lacquered and laminated.

LACQUERED

The lacquering is a kind of painting that uses lacquer, that is, covering polyester paint or colored polyurethane.

Wood surfaces or wood fibers can be lacquered.

Being an applied coating, the customization possibilities are endless and it is possible to cover the colorimetric RAL, realizing any shade of color.

RIFRA offers its specific colors, which can also be customized on request:

In addition you can choose from glossy or matte lacquer, two sides of the same coin that can confer very different sensations for equal colors.

• Glossy: reflects like a mirror.
• Matte: absorbs light.

Glossy lacquering

Matte lacquering

The polyester lacquering is the best because it uses polyester polyurethane paint.

The polyester paint is composed of resin, hardeners and catalysts.

In other words it perfectly covers the surface, giving thickness in hue, impact resistance, homogeneity and flatness.

The panel preparation for glossy lacquering requires an extra step of grinding compared to the matte lacquering.

Then sandpapers are used, with finer grits in the glossy one and thicker grits in the matte one.

For optimal results, 180 g / m2 are necessary for the glossy one, while for the matte one 140 g / m2 of lacquer on MDF panel are needed.

For the glossy, after subsequent steps of polishing with cotton brushes both manual and automatic, and specific pastes, you get a brightness equal to that of a mirror.

RIFRA production also has a cutting edge for painting and polishing; we have prepared this video to let you better understand how we work:
http://rifra.com/en/p/produzione.aspx

Being a coating and not a bonded sheet, as we shall see in the case of the laminate, the lacquering needs some special attention.

To perform maintenance and cleaning, we recommend using a soft cloth dampened with water and a little soap.

Abrasive sponges, aggressive degreasers, acids, alcohol or products not suited to the cleaning of lacquered surfaces that could alter the color or even scratch the surface are absolutely not to be used.

The lacquered furniture is more delicate than laminated one, therefore the maintenance must be realized with due caution.

The lacquering is synonymous with prestige and refinement.

A perfect polish also immediately affects the home owner and the visitor with a “WOW” effect impossible to find in the case of use of the laminate, which instead get the opposite feeling, and continueing reading you’ll understand why.

LAMINATED

The laminate is the material that is characterized by low cost and practicality of use.

The most common type is calledlaminate HPLStands for high pressure laminate, Because the sheets are glued together by means of a strong pressure in combination with heat.

It’s a plastic sheet saturated with melamine resin that covers the support, and generally consists of chipboard or MDF panels.

To make them more stable the sheets are then fastened to plywood supports of varying thickness.

Depending on the gluing system, within certain limits it does not scratch and does not break but, since it is made of plastic material, it can easily be unstuck over time.

Not considering it a suitable material to RIFRA Brand, unlike other high quality manufacturers, in order to be consistent we do not propose it in any of our collections, as it would impoverish them in terms of both quality and aesthetic, compromising the end result when the kitchen is set up, and the subsequent customer satisfaction.

Below a summary sketch of the two materials

Section of the glossy lacquered door RIFRA

Section of a glossy laminated door, generic manufacturer.

Section of the Matte lacquered door RiFRA

I will be waiting for you next week at Milan design week. To the RiFRA showroom in Corso Matteotti 1 in Milan, from Tuesday April 4th to Saturday April 8th from 10 to 22, and on Sunday, April 9th from 10 to 18.

The website for the event registration (recommended to be able to better organized), is:
http://www.rifra.com/milanodesignweek2017/

Thanks for your interest,

Matteo Rivolta

RiFRA Milano srl

P. S.: stay connected with RIFRA, visit our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/rifra and subscribe to stay updated.