This is the Elysia outdoor kitchen from Fontana Forni. It was designed by us in Virtual Reality, built in Italy, shipped across the ocean on pallets, and we assembled the entire thing ourselves in just a couple of days. In this article, we're putting it under the microscope to see if the quality actually justifies the price. Because if you're going to spend premium outdoor kitchen money… it better be built like it.

Fontana Elysia outdoor kitchen

Over the past several years we’ve shown you several different ways to build an outdoor kitchen: The cheapest route, where you build it from scratch all by yourself, the far easier but still budget-conscious modular option, the less budget-conscious but couldn't-be-easier pre-assembled option, and now we're going to answer the question, "What does the premium option actually give you?

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Disclaimer

But before we get started, let’s address the elephant in the room. Fontana Forni sent us this Elysia outdoor kitchen setup to review.

And let's just be clear: we have this set up as an indoor kitchen studio to shoot YouTube videos. This is not the same size most people are putting in their back yard, but our goal here at The Barbecue Lab has always been to test everything we're able to: from budget gear all the way up to the high-end stuff, so you can see what the differences actually are.

We're going to do our best to transparently share our thoughts and experience with you, but no, Fontana doesn’t get to see this video before it goes live, we don't have marketing points to cover and our thoughts are our own. So that being said... let's get started, and figure out if the quality justifies the price.

Designing your Fontana Elysia Outdoor Kitchen is simple.

A few months ago, we shared our experience designing this kitchen ourselves. I would encourage you to go back and watch that next, if you're actually considering any kind of outdoor kitchen build.

But to catch you up if you missed that one, we designed this layout ourselves on the Fontana website, had a free virtual consultation with a member of the Fontana team, and were then able to see our design in this exact space using virtual reality before placing our order.

So how close is the finished product to what we thought we were ordering?

Honestly? 100% and I'm not even exaggerating. How many times have I ordered something expecting a certain size, only to be under- or overwhelmed by what actually arrived?

This kitchen is literally exactly what I expected. During the VR testing, we were able to walk around the cabinets and do everything short of opening the drawers, so we already had "experienced" it in the space it would fill. There were no surprises. It was exactly what I was expecting. Except for 1 thing that we couldn't get a sense of in VR. And I'll get to that in just a minute.

Delivery

About a week after our order was placed, our delivery arrived. It came in a box truck with liftgate service. All of the cabinetry is shipped flat-packed and stacked on a pallet, or in our case, the wooden crate housing the pizza desk for the Volta pizza oven.

The 12mm thick Neolith countertops were all packaged individually, and separately from the cabinets, and were well-reinforced. Out of the 9 tops we received, none of them were cracked, chipped, or damaged in any way, which surprised me. In fact, none of the pieces we received had any degree of damage. Not a scratch or dent to be found on anything, which is sadly uncommon in the gear we receive to test here at The Lab.

Assembling our Pre-Fabbed Outdoor Kitchen

I invited a few of my buddies over to help me begin assembling the cabinets and drawers. As soon as we began unboxing the first piece, I realized something that I hadn't quite expected. These modular pieces are just built differently than anything I'd tested before.

Each piece is really heavy, and a lot more dense than I expected. It was kind of like opening up the firebox on my Outlaw Hoss and expecting it to feel the same as an Oklahoma Joe. All of a sudden I realized, "Oh, THIS is one of the reasons why it costs more."

The assembly got off to a slow start, if I'm honest, because our boxes were shipped with the European instructions rather than the American instructions. Hats off to any Europeans who can make better sense of that than we could, but my crew definitely required it to be spelled out a little differently.

Thankfully, if that happens to anyone else, the American version of the assembly instructions are available for download from the Fontana website, as well as some simple assembly videos.

All-in-all, once we got going with the proper instructions, each piece took an average of 45 minutes, give or take, depending on how many drawers were a part of the design, since they take longer to assemble.

Elysia Outdoor Kitchen Modules

We explained in our design video a little about the thought process that went into the choices that we made, so I won't go into that too much now. But OUR design included 5 different modular pieces, some of which appear more than once.

All of the pieces are 36" in height, 27.5" in depth, and include self-adjusting feet to help you achieve a perfectly level surface. The exterior is a weather-resistant powder-coated galvanized steel that can be ordered in a variety of colors if you want something different than the standard black. You can order your modular pieces with this 12mm neolith countertop, or without, if you'd prefer to supply a custom countertop from elsewhere.

The modular pieces all lock together, with rear cutouts and pass-throughs available for running things like power, gas, and water lines.

Storage 90

This is the Storage 90 cabinet. It's 90cm (or 35 inches) wide, with 3 huge soft-close drawers. Each drawer can hold up to 40 pounds, and at 32x18.5x7.5, these are high-capacity drawers. Because of the nature of what we do, we have more outdoor cooking accessories than most, and these drawers have finally made it easy for us to keep all of our outdoor cooking tools together and organized. 

Elysia storage 90

Open Shelf

This is the open shelf unit, with the same outer dimensions as the Storage 90. Instead of 3 drawers, you see 3 open shelves, 2 of which include stainless steel panels. We like these for storing larger things like pots and pans, small appliances, and cutting boards. But if I'm honest, that's not how we'd use them if our kitchen were actually outdoors. We know all too well that critters love outdoor kitchens, and we would likely use these to store firewood and countertop cooking appliances.

Elysia open shelf

Storage 65

This unit is the Storage 65, measuring just 65 cm, or 25.6 inches, in width. The top drawer can support up to 40 pounds and can still fit a substantial amount, in spite of it's smaller width than the Storage 90. The bottom drawer has a bracket to house a standard trash bin, or dual pellet bins. We're using it for trash, but I really like the idea of two watertight bins for charcoal and wood pellet fuel in here. The trash can does not come with the cabinet and will need to be purchased separately, but I'll link to the can that we've found to fit the best down in the description.

Elysia Storage 65

Sink

The sink is also 65 cm wide and comes with a stainless steel sink and faucet, but you could always swap those out with something custom if you prefer. There are access points in the rear and the base, offering options for plumbing runs. In our case, where no plumbing is available at all, we've set up a self-contained water system where we pump clean water from a 5-gallon jug into the sink, and then capture all the wastewater into a separate container below. 

We're using the Prisym One system that I discovered at the HPBExpo a few weeks ago, and it was the perfect solution for this setup, where plumbing wasn't available. I admit, running plumbing to our DIY outdoor kitchen was weeks of work, and this system took us less than 15 minutes to install, which I loved. 

Fridge 65

This unit is the Fridge 65. It can be ordered with or without the fridge itself. We ordered just the framing to house the fridge plus the countertop. We've installed the REFR2D from RCSGrills as our refrigerator.

At 65 cm wide, the Fridge 65 can accommodate any standard outdoor-rated refrigerator while still maintaining the consistent look and functionality of the rest of your kitchen, and yes, that includes wine fridges as well.

Elysia Fridge 65 with an RCS outdoor refrigerator

We installed RCS appliances and fixtures in our outdoor kitchen at home, so we knew we wanted to use RCS again in this spot. Their new glass door refrigerator had the look we wanted here at The Lab for video, and we'll have more on this model soon. 

Fontana Outdoor Kitchen Cooking Appliances

The Elysia offers 3 different options when it comes to cooking appliances.

The first, and most obvious for the Fontana Forni brand, is an outdoor oven. These could be installed on top of any of the counters or separately, on a pizza desk like what we have here. We chose the pizza desk so that we would have the flexibility to roll our oven outside to use, since we house it inside our barn. 

Volta 90 model with outstanding performance and control

The second cooking appliance offered is a gas grill, specifically a Lynx Professional or Lynx Sedona gas grill, in either natural gas or propane. Because there isn't a standard cutout size required from brand to brand, pretty much any modular kitchen you find will have a similar limitation when it comes to appliance options.

The third option, perhaps offering the greatest flexibility, is the kamado cabinet, allowing you to install whatever kamado you prefer.

Several outdoor rated flat top griddle options can be used on countertops, rather than recessed, so that's always a possibility as well. I know both Le Griddle and Eno have great options for builds like this. You could even store the griddles down on a shelf when they're not in use to keep that clean look going if you wanted.

Since our use case is an indoor studio, we're sans grills in our build because proper ventilation to code is VERY expensive. For now, we have some fun things in store in the near future on how we'll be cooking here in this kitchen.

Is the Elysia worth the investment?

We started this article trying to decide if this kitchen is worth the premium price tag, so let's start by looking at the benefits and drawbacks of buying a modular outdoor kitchen.

Designing the Elysia kitchen is easy.

The first benefit to me is the ease of design. Each piece is a plug-and-play setup, so you're not measuring drawer heights and offsets and all of the more complex elements of outdoor kitchen design when you do it DIY.

Future changes and additions are simple.

Secondly, modular design makes changes and additions easy as life changes. If you want to add to your kitchen, you can buy another piece or two in the future. With our DIY build, what's done is done, and it would take a sledgehammer to modify the build, and we're not going there.

No contractor or builder required.

Third, it's the ease of the actual build process. Our kitchen took us over 11 months to build, and the mortar and brick work, reverse pouring countertops and concrete board process still gives me nightmares if I'm honest.

The biggest drawback to modular outdoor kitchen design I think is that you can't build in whatever grill or appliances you want wherever you want them. If you're convinced you want a warming drawer built into a cabinet, this route probably isn't for you and custom is the way to go.

Price consideration

I could use the price point as a positive or a negative here, and that all depends on your perspective. I know that there are certain brands of modular outdoor kitchens that cost over $3,000 per linear foot. Custom outdoor kitchen builds can easily be much higher than that. There are some modular kitchens that cost around $400 per linear foot. The Elysia outdoor kitchen is about $1,000 per linear foot, which is what I'd call a Premium modular kitchen. You could spend WAY more and also MUCH less, so each to their own on that point.

I fully recognize that you'll have to take my word with a grain of salt since this kitchen was sent to us to review. However, we're genuinely asking ourselves if there's anything at all that would have disappointed me if I had. And I truly can't think of a thing.

Everything from the design process to the consultation, to the order and delivery. I mean, there was the instructions mix-up, but that was so minor and easily solvable. The pieces all assembled easily, and leveling them wasn't that difficult at all. The overall quality of what we've put together only exceeded my expectations versus what I was expecting.

Yes, we saved a ton of money DIYing our outdoor kitchen back home, but I've been really honest about the mistakes we made in the process and the things we wish we'd done differently.

Yes, we had the freedom to fully customize it however we wanted, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. We designed it ourselves, and we're not designers. Some of the decisions we made, in hindsight, were honestly dumb, but we didn't realize the flaws in our plan until the project was already finished and in use, and at that point, we were fully committed.

Sure, we saved ourselves money by not hiring a contractor to do it for us, but we literally spent every spare minute of 11 months to do it all ourselves. At some point, your time and energy has value as well, and that needs to be a consideration.

In contrast, this kitchen also didn't require a contractor, and we still "built it" ourselves, but it only took us a couple of days. Like I said earlier, most people will never put a kitchen of this size in their backyard, and are probably already down in the comments giving us hate for even exposing our audience to such a "luxury option."

However, I know some people WANT to build a high-quality prefab outdoor kitchen without having to hire a contractor, and they hopefully appreciate the opportunity to see the Elysia kitchen "in real life" before making their decision to buy. 

We’ve now shown several very different ways to build an outdoor kitchen—from DIY builds all the way up to premium modular systems like this. The right choice really comes down to your budget, your space, and how permanent you want that outdoor kitchen to be.

If the Elysia piques your interest, be sure to use the links at the top of this page along with the code BBQLABVIP to access exclusive pricing.