The maison closest to the fire

Gaggenau is one of the oldest manufacturing houses still working in Europe. It was founded in 1683 in the Black Forest, later refined through Lipsheim in Alsace, and is now the German appliance maison whose precise, restrained engineering has shaped the European luxury kitchen for most of three and a half centuries. In September 2024 the maison named me its first Malaysian Culinary Spokesperson, its first appointment in Southeast Asia. In that role I have built and launched the Steward Circle for Gaggenau Malaysia, a programme that brings the architects, interior designers, owners and would-be owners who choose the maison together around the kitchen at Inspiration Haus.

The maison

Gaggenau began in 1683 as an ironworks in the Black Forest village whose name it took. Over three centuries it became a small-tools workshop, then a maker of precision instruments, and by the second half of the twentieth century the German manufacturer whose ovens, hobs, steam combination units and refrigeration set the standard for the European fine-dining kitchen. The house has earned three claims: a workshop with a long, unbroken history; engineering that knows when to hold back; and surfaces designed to disappear into the architecture, so the eye lands on the cooking.

The second, engineering that holds back, is the one I measure my own work against most.

First Malaysian Culinary Spokesperson, September 2024

Gaggenau named me its first Malaysian Culinary Spokesperson in September 2024, the first appointment to the role in Southeast Asia. The regional design and lifestyle press carried the news: Design Speak Asia, Creative HomeX and IndesignLive, and Cittabella in the Chinese-language press in March 2025.

Every piece made the same point, that this was a first. Gaggenau does not appoint Culinary Spokespeople lightly, and its reputation rests on taking its time over them. A first Malaysian appointment was a considered decision on the maison’s part. When I told Design Speak Asia at the time, “It mirrors my own culinary philosophy”, I meant it. The partnership grew out of two workshops that think about the work in the same way. Product category had very little to do with it.

IndesignLive put it a little differently. It read the partnership less as a chef paired with an appliance and more as a change in how the Malaysian culinary conversation sits between European craft and Southeast Asian terroir. I thought that was right.

The Steward Circle: Gaggenau Malaysia’s working community at Inspiration Haus

The most important work I have done as spokesperson is building and launching the Steward Circle for Gaggenau Malaysia. It gathers the maison’s working community around the kitchen at Inspiration Haus, Gaggenau’s flagship in Kuala Lumpur.

The Circle exists to do one thing the Malaysian luxury-appliance market has needed for years: make Gaggenau a kitchen people cook in. Too many Malaysian homes and developer show units have installed Gaggenau as an object of desire, the appliance every aspiring kitchen must have, whether or not anyone ever opens the steam oven. That helps the maison’s sales and lets down its purpose. The Steward Circle is the correction.

How it runs: the MasterClass series

The Circle runs on a series of MasterClasses that I design myself. Each is built for a particular audience, and each raises the maison’s presence at a different level of the Malaysian luxury kitchen world. The MasterClasses are the engine. Without them the Circle would be a community in name only. With them it is a working practice.

Two commitments set these MasterClasses apart from anything else the Malaysian luxury-appliance market offers today.

Hands-on and live. Every session is live, with attendees at the appliances instead of in front of a screen. The steam oven runs in the room. So do the combi-steam unit, the wok burner, the warming drawer and the wine column, all working in the same hour the attendees are there.

Tasting à la minute. Every MasterClass ends with tasting à la minute: food cooked on the appliances during the session, plated and served on the spot. Attendees do more than watch what an appliance does. They taste it fresh, in the room where it was made, and that plate is the proof.

That is what Gaggenau × James Won means in practice: the maison’s appliances in the hands of a working chef, in a live MasterClass built around tasting. Nobody is handed a brochure or walked round a static showroom, and nobody sits through a one-way sales pitch.

Who the Circle serves: four groups, each linked to the others

For architects and interior designers who specify the maison. The Circle gives them a place and a working tool at Inspiration Haus for their conversations with clients. When a designer recommends Gaggenau to a homeowner, they can bring that homeowner here to see the appliances cooked on, taste what the steam oven does, and understand the design and the way it works in person.

For Gaggenau Lovers and would-be owners. The Circle is the way into the Gaggenau world: the community, the conversation and the everyday ritual a Gaggenau kitchen is meant to be part of. Owners who already have the kitchen find people who use it the way it was built to be used. Those still deciding whether to install one get a real working preview in place of a sales pitch.

For me as a chef. The MasterClasses are where I share the fine-dining thinking I spent twelve years in fine dining developing, adapted for cooking and entertaining at home. That adaptation is the work. A steam oven runs the same way in a three-Michelin-star kitchen as it does in a home, with the same thinking behind it and the same workflow. In the MasterClass, home cooks and keen hosts learn to use what they own to the standard the maison built it for.

For the maison. The Circle raises use, deepens loyalty, and removes the stigma of Gaggenau as a luxury object sitting idle behind glass. Everyone who attends goes home with a different relationship to their own kitchen, and to the maison, than a brochure could ever build.

In a quiet way, it is the part of my Gaggenau role closest to cultural diplomacy: bringing a European maison and a Southeast Asian audience into the same way of working. Inspiration Haus is the room, and the MasterClass series is the practice.

How the three kitchen and atelier partnerships fit together

In the Kitchen, atelier and tableware group, three maisons sit at three different points in how a kitchen works. Mepra is closest to the hand: cutlery, the implement that meets the plate. The Plan is closest to the room: the architectural decisions behind the kitchen itself. Gaggenau is closest to the fire: the appliance the hand reaches for while cooking.

Between them they cover the European workshop from the hand to the room to the fire, and I hold one ambassadorship at each depth.

What continues

The 2025 move from running restaurants to conservation and cultural diplomacy did not change my work with Gaggenau. The Spokesperson role continues, and so does the Steward Circle. The conversations Gaggenau leads on kitchen architecture and appliance precision carry straight into what I do now, especially advisory work where European appliance specification meets Malaysian indigenous ingredients and the ways they are prepared. Wherever my next kitchen is, public or private, advisory or residential, Gaggenau will probably be in it.

The archive: other frames

A small gallery of frames that did not make the main story, kept for the record and for anyone who wants to look a little longer before leaving the page.