Poggenpohl St Albans Create a Seamless Kitchen Design with Understated Luxury

This week’s instalment of the Project of the Week series features a seamless kitchen design by 2025 SBID Awards Finalist, Poggenpohl St Albans.

A family with a love of cooking and entertaining commissioned Poggenpohl St Albans to create their new kitchen. The client wanted a large, professionally capable kitchen, offering a seamless design and understated luxury. Using a large remit of Gaggenau appliances and two Zip taps, the kitchen also needed to offer relaxed seating. Both a bar and casual table seating were incorporated into the island, which has no worktop joins, but instead offers a step up to create a unique design and height difference. Glass cabinetary creates a beautiful addition to the design, allowing the customer to display collectibles.

What was the client's brief?

The architecture wasn’t changing for this kitchen design, there was to be no extension or removal of walls, which is fairly unusual now. It was already a fabulous open space, but with a kitchen that wasn’t fit for purpose, especially for a family of keen cooks who love to entertain and even sometimes employ professional chefs to come to the house. The home often has a lot of young people coming and going. The client wanted somewhere to sit as a family of four in the main part of the kitchen, to be close to the cooking, which would mostly be on the hob, so an array of cooking surfaces was requested. Very specifically, the brief required there to be no joins in the worktop at all, with symmetry and order high up on the wish list.

What inspired the design of the project?

The challenge of listening to a brief and being fully allowed, by the client, to create a space that would work perfectly for their family and how they live and move within their home.

What was the toughest hurdle your team overcame during the project?

Siting 2 hot taps, with the one on the island being particularly challenging. The real challenge though was anticipating that the two ends of the tall run needed to float to bring the symmetry demanded in the brief, it would have been easy to ignore it and add a panel to the floor where the free-standing cooling was located, leaving a plinth return on the oven end. We set about adding a necessary panel to the floor and that created a plinth line for the return, then added a floating panel so we now had both end panels floating. It’s a small detail in a kitchen packed with unseen detailing but the most rewarding to get right. We also had to ensure the sliding pocket doors were unhindered, and our wall units fitted to a sub frame all specified in our drawings. The new tiles on the floor were also planned exactly so we could remove the previous, widen slightly and keep the existing timber floor as if nothing had changed.

What was your team’s highlight of the project?

To be given the project by the client who understood our vision, all our suggestions were considered and agreed upon, and then left for us to deliver, so exceeding that expectation meant we had to really galvanise the specification and surprise them with the little things. A step ladder in the plinth was added to reach higher into the cupboards, lighting in all the pull outs and drawers, down to the accessories that you see when opening a drawer - practical in their location but matching subtlety, down to the plate holders in the pull outs.

Why did you enter the SBID Awards?

We have a strong connection as a company to these awards, this is the second time St Albans has been a finalist in recent years, and all three Poggenpohl London studios have their own tally and successes. Being part of the SBID community is so important, as well as hopefully the accolade of wining allows us to promote ourselves further within the interior design industry.

What has being an Award Finalist meant to you and your business?

Personally, the accolade is a recognition for my core belief of the adage ‘the devil is in the detail’. The entire team followed that principle and delivered that ethos throughout, from the worktop and tabletop heights to matching larders in two different size tall units. It demonstrates that thinking past the norm or standard, really will deliver you the perfection we all strive for. For the business it has given us the confidence to stand by our design principles and present them to prospective clients as the right choice for them. This is a professional standard and by becoming a finalist, we prove our design can match our product as market leader in the luxury kitchen market.

Questions answered by Robert Bell, Studio Manager at Poggenpohl St Albans.