Oh boy, what a Kitchen

You're an evil genius, bent on world domination.

You have a nuclear weapon simmering away in the basement of your underground lair, deep within some Polynesian volcanic island. You still have to eat.

Which means you need a kitchen. May I suggest the Porsche Design Kitchen P'7340 built by Poggenpohl?

Cool cabinetry

If cool, nocturnal and sinister are what you're looking for in kitchen cabinetry, this suite of modular units and appliances is your ticket: free-standing islands and wall-mounted cabinets, high-tech Miele appliances and black chrome Dornbracht fixtures.

Penned and engineered by Porsche Design — a branch of the company that also makes a certain sports car — the P'7340 had its West Coast premiere in Southern California recently.

Porsche Design and Poggenpohl call this the Kitchen for Men. The premise seems to be that with male traits, comes a love of the sleek, the minimal, the rigorously rectangular.

This generally describes the Weltanschauung of Porsche Design, whose successful men's accessories business seems to be aimed at skinny Berliners named Dieter.

Heaven for men

I grant that it is a dude heaven. For example, the cabinets don't have any handles.

To open them, you push on the cabinets and the front panels float silently outward; in the case of hinged upper cabinets, there is a spring-loaded assisted-opening feature.

As you close the cabinets, an electronic sensor activates a motorised cinch mechanism that pulls the doors for the last centimetres.

Further dude-itude is embodied in the integral appliances — convection, microwave and steam ovens, glass-top stove and automatic coffee and espresso machine — all offered in the 8mm aluminium-framed rectangles.

According to Ted Chappell, chief executive of Poggenpohl US, the sample kitchen at the Pacific Design Centre would run about $75,000 (Dh275,497).

Of course, since it's aimed at men, the kitchen has to have a TV, an LCD-based multimedia centre fitted into a black-glass panel.

Because this rig is covered in glass, the video display can even be integrated into the back splash area.
And yet, a kitchen for men?

Which men? My college roommates? For them, you would have needed one huge cabinet with dividers to organise cereal boxes and a dispenser that would eject cans of refreshment.

As for me, I like to cook and want to leave some appliances, such as my mega KitchenAid mixer, out on the counter.

Keep it clean

Alas, with the Kitchen for Men, leaving anything other than a feng shui flower arrangement on the counter makes the installation look like a hovel.

I don't want a kitchen that requires me to maintain it as if Architectural Digest were coming over. I want to leave the toaster out without worrying about degrading my kitchen's aerodynamics.

Furthermore, is there enough Windex in the world to keep this kitchen shiny?

In engineering, there's a phrase: high criticality. The Porsche/Poggenpohl kitchen has it in spades.

As a product line, Poggenpohl's new kitchen caters to an expanding luxury market that splits the difference between bespoke custom cabinetry and pret-a-porter instals.

The pull-outs, overhead cabinets, islands, lighting arches and appliances come in a variety of dimensions but you can't really order custom sizes unless you are prepared to pay a major premium and wait a long time.

Not just any contractor can slam one of these babies in, either. Poggenpohl will send out an engineer to make sure everything is plumbed and plum.

The fit and finish are gorgeous and the aesthetic — hovering weightlessly in the future tense of domestic design — is so beautiful I can hardly stand it.

But as a kitchen? Only if you don't cook.