bahí&güell’s Caliu barbecue features an innovative coal lighting system to produce even heat ever time
Caliu is a table-top barbecue designed for your garden or on your terrace, with a style based on simplicity and user-friendliness from storing it away, transporting it, lighting the coals to cooking over them.
Designed and made in the Girona region of Spain by Catalonian designers bahí&güell, the barbecues’ large rectangular cooking surface makes the best use of whatever space is available. With an attractive pack-away design it benefits from few parts, all non-moving, and that are ready-assembled; resulting in a sturdy long-lasting product.
Having set the brief of improving the overall experience of barbecuing with family and friends the designers realised that the key was to facilitate a process to light the charcoal and then to share the cooking process by putting the barbecue in the middle of the table for everybody to cook and enjoy at the same time with no problems.
Users can use the chimney to start the coals easily, creating heat evenly in the stack, while the user can be elsewhere preparing the food and drink, before the coals are spread into the main body to be cooked over.
A year in development, the design process began by defining reasonable sizes and calculating the measurements between key parts to get the best performance for the barbecue’s size.
“Then, we started to draw some sketches of the style we wanted,” says one half of the design duo, Jordi Bahí. “We were looking for the best combination of materials and manufacturing processes to use, and characteristics we wanted like finishes, compactness and durability.”
With partner Jordi Güell, the pair produced 3D models in Rhino to produce six initial prototypes to fine tune the technical process for each part, before renders in Bunkspeed Shot and several more prototypes were produced to help finalise the designs, before widening the Caliu range and accessories.
