The atelier behind the room

The Plan is a luxury kitchen and wardrobe atelier in Kuala Lumpur. For more than a decade it has brought European craft into Malaysian homes: Poggenpohl from Germany, Ernestomeda and Porro from Italy, Sub-Zero & Wolf from the United States, and a chosen group of European houses that sit well alongside them. The atelier is a workshop. It is where the architectural decisions get made that let a kitchen work the way the cooking in it deserves. The Plan named me its inaugural Ambassador. We then designed the residence kitchen together, and the atelier now cites that design as intellectual property.

The inaugural ambassadorship

The Plan named me its inaugural Ambassador, the first appointment of its kind in the atelier’s history. The reference page at theplan.com.my/about-us/our-ambassador records it. The Plan had never named an ambassador before, and the first one it chose was a chef whose kitchens it had watched closely for more than a decade, through the years of Brasserie Enfin, Enfin by James Won, Bouchon Enfin and Shin’Labo.

Each of the maisons The Plan represents has its own standing.

Poggenpohl. The German kitchen house, founded in 1892, whose modular precision and finishing have set the standard for the European kitchen for more than a century.

Ernestomeda. The Italian kitchen house working at the contemporary end of European design, where craft meets industrial design.

Sub-Zero & Wolf. The American maison whose refrigeration and cooking equipment is built to the highest standard of residential precision.

Porro. The Italian house whose modular furniture and residential systems belong among the most carefully made European interiors, next to the kitchen makers. It is one of the most sought-after designer brands from Italy.

When an atelier with this portfolio names its first ambassador, it is saying something about fit. It tells me my way of working matches the atelier’s at the level where decisions are made, well before anything reaches a showroom floor.

The residence kitchen we designed together, and where it went next

The most important piece of work The Plan and I have done together is an exclusive Poggenpohl kitchen for my own home, fitted with Gaggenau 400 series appliances, Poggenpohl cabinetry and AtlasPlan solid surfaces. We worked through the brief side by side: workflow, ergonomics, appliance specification, and the order of preparation, service and clean-down. The kitchen works the way a working chef would build one from first principles, made with the atelier’s European craft.

What happened next is the part I am proudest of. The design has been taken up in Malaysia’s luxury-property market as a model for ergonomic and appliance planning. A major luxury apartment development, not yet complete, has built the thinking behind it into its own kitchen template. That told us quietly that the design was never just for one home. It worked as a template from the start.

Brand partnerships between kitchens and ateliers aim for this kind of result and seldom get it. A kitchen designed by a chef, built with an atelier that delivers European craft, has become a reference for a developer building for the wider luxury market. For a partnership like this, that is about as close as it gets to changing how Malaysian luxury homes are built.

The workshop behind the workshop

The Plan has a particular place among the brands I work with. Gaggenau, the kitchen-appliance partnership, brought the equipment. Mepra, the cutlery ambassadorship, brought what the meal is eaten with. The Plan brought the architectural decisions that come before either of those: the room itself. The kitchen footprint, the cabinetry brief, the wardrobes that sit in the home around the work. Of all the maisons, The Plan is the one closest to the room.

What links The Plan to my other kitchen and atelier partners is that each sees itself as a workshop. Mepra in Lumezzane. Gaggenau in Lipsheim. Poggenpohl in Herford. Ernestomeda in Pesaro. The Plan is the Malaysian outpost that brings those European workshops together in a single brief. With the residence kitchen, it also brought them into a single finished piece of work, which has now travelled beyond my own home into the wider Malaysian luxury-residential market.

What continues

When I moved from running restaurants to conservation and cultural diplomacy in 2025, the Plan ambassadorship stayed as it was. Kitchen architecture matters whether I run a public room or host private dining, and the residence matters whether I cook at home or entertain there. The maisons The Plan represents (Poggenpohl, Ernestomeda, Sub-Zero & Wolf) make that continuity possible.

The next chapter of the ambassadorship has not been written yet. Like Mepra, this is a partnership that never depended on an open restaurant. Now that a developer has adopted the residence kitchen design, its influence is reaching well past any single room.

Designer of the Year recognition across the atelier’s portfolio

Year after year, the maisons The Plan represents have been named in the Designer of the Year (DOTY) Awards, Malaysia’s most considered design honour. The atelier’s portfolio keeps appearing in the Best Product Design category:

• Poggenpohl, Modo kitchen by Jorge Pensi: Best Product Design 2023
• Ernestomeda, Sign kitchen by Giuseppe Bavuso: Best Product Design 2023
• Sub-Zero & Wolf: Best Product Design 2023
• Porro: Best Product Design 2025
• Ernestomeda: Best Product Design 2025

Five awards across two cycles say a good deal about the atelier’s taste, and about the standard its residence kitchens are built to.

The atelier’s commitments

The Plan works to three principles that are close to the discipline of a working kitchen.

Passion. “People with passion can change the world for the better.” (Steve Jobs). The atelier brings passion to every brief, and I see the same conviction in the homes it builds.

Perfection. “Small things make perfection, but perfection is no small thing.” (Henry Royce). The atelier’s patience with detail is the same patience cooking asks for. Perfection is something you keep practising and never finish, with pride and professionalism at every step.

Professional. Integrity, expertise and exceptional service. The atelier listens before it recommends and builds long partnerships with its clients. I try to work the same way in my kitchen.

The atelier’s reference page is at theplan.com.my.