Kitchen dreams
Küchenhandel

While creating handmade kitchen dream pieces, the company plan 3 relies on the mutual German-Czech custom work. An attractive residence: the company plan 3 küchen GmbH enjoys having its business place in the old above-ground bunker in Siegen. A long wooden table and a functional kitchen specially designed for this space are all that Sascha Vetter and Walter Müller need there for their work in addition to their laptops. They call this place their design studio and workshop, which they intentionally designed and furnished in a minimalist way: "We no longer wanted just a showroom store, but had longed for a radical change."

Plan 3 cares about providing a creative space for development in which they can work up our new ideas together with our customers. There is neither a rigid program, nor any fixed elements or forms. Every kitchen is an original. "Thanks to our own manufactory we also started to invent and create new kitchens," says Walter Müller. For seventeen years he devoted himself to consultancy and selling kitchens and for ten years he ran his own brand studios with bulthaup and Siematic. Since 2001 he has been working together with Sascha Vetter. They make together an extraordinary team: the experienced senior designer and consultant with a sonorous voice and the dynamic company founder and executive, Mr. Vetter. Simply put, they are a beautifully symbiotic and complementary team. Sascha Vetter, a skilled building designer and architect, is in charge of the company development, project planning and coordination. Walter Müller takes care of the individual kitchen design. The third important person of their company team is the manufactory manager Martin Talas. He is a joiner foreman who is with six other employees responsible for the craftsmanship and implementation of the kitchen projects in the Czech Republic. There, four years after starting his business in Germany in 2003, Vetter founded his second company plan 3 manufactory Ltd. This way they can provide kitchens for both the German and Czech markets. Vetter has his family roots in the Czech Republic, where he also graduated at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Because of love he decided to stay and live in the Czech countryside. Now his main residence is in Uherske Hradiste, which situated about 120 km from Vienna. Every four to six weeks he travels to Germany which represents the largest market for the company. About 70 percent of company sales are generated by German customers.

We mostly furnish private households. In Germany new projects in already existing properties predominate. In the Czech Republic the company equips new buildings such as larger residential houses or villas. In addition, we also produce other furniture for the spaces like dining rooms, dressing rooms, bathrooms or staircase constructions. The main goal is to create kitchen area and high-quality living space, where not only the furniture itself plays an important role, but also the overall space impression. „A lot of customers aren’t even familiar with what is possible to create in the kitchen," says Vetter and Müller. Our mission is to show them the potential and present them all the options in the terms of aesthetics, purpose and functionality. This takes time, which a typical designer doesn’t usually have. Sometimes 10 pre-sessions with a customer mostly at his home are nothing out of ordinary, as they are crucial for precise planning. The kitchen design process is based on CAD environment and other sophisticated techniques supporting photorealistic display. On request, customers can visit the manufactory or they can be continuously informed by receiving the photos of their kitchen project phases. Mineral materials such as Corian are widely used in the kitchen processing, accompanied by solid wood, metal and glass. Corian makes it possible to create optically seamless transitions while connecting surfaces, it is easy to handle and clean, explains a company team member. It is used for making both kitchen worktops and fronts. The kitchen project prices range from approx. 20,000 to 50,000 euros, but they can reach up to six digits as well. "When a customer wishes for a lower-budget kitchen," says Vetter, "it is also possible with a proper laminate front." If our kitchens were too expensive, it would be the beginning of the end. In fact, we have a lot of design-demanding customers who, however, cannot afford to pay such high prices.

It is early October and Sascha Vetter is just back in his hometown in Siegen to spend there several days. Together with Walter Müller they are on their way to see Werner Seelbach, who belongs to the architect network that plan 3 has built up over the years in Germany and the Czech Republic. They keep inspiring one another and provide new customers in return. Company inquiries are also made via our website and of course thanks to our customers’ recommendations or previous orders. The designer trio Vetter-Müller-Seelbach cooperates intensively. At present they are working on a huge kitchen design project with an integrated utility room. They have even equipped a doctor’s surgery together before. All of them perceive medical environment as a huge market potential, because in surgeries they can apply the similar design elements as while designing kitchens.

At Seelbach's home: Plenty of white, plenty of light and a plan 3 kitchen with two smaller islands instead of a typical large monolith. All of this in combination with a shiny black wall cabinet with integrated appliances. The architect had already convinced himself of their design and quality before. However, he was astonished by the short and effective assembly time. He had 2 kitchens built in his house which were both fully installed and ready to use within 2 or 3 days. The kitchens had travelled to their final destination almost 1.000 kilometres accompanied by three carpenters from plan 3. This is the usual procedure: The carpenters make the assembly. At least one of them is usually directly involved in the kitchen manufactory. In the case of Seelbach's kitchen that was our specialist for mineral materials. The kitchen is made of mineral material Krion of Spanish origin. For our company manufactory it is absolutely crucial to get all the work done professionally and precisely. Craft perfection is our signature and every kitchen is assembled at customer´s only by our company carpenters. "On-site assembly represents our final production," explains the kitchen designer Müller.

Next year Sascha Vetter is going to celebrate 20 th anniversary of plan 3 company. He always invites new impressions and tries to implement extraordinary solutions. He was the first one who started to cooperate with company BORA in the Czech market. He mentions that in Bora magazines their company work is often referred as to "planning with a number of design tricks". In our kitchens digital system features in terms of Smart Home have played only a minor role so far. „The most important factor for us is to make cooking entertaining and transform it into a real pleasure and this must our kitchens provide,” says Vetter. In addition to the kitchen and furniture manufactory, he also runs the cafeteria Jiné Café 2 in his other homeland. The café interior is also equipped with plan 3 furniture, so it may serve as another showroom where people can meet in order to discuss their kitchen design project. Nowadays plan 3 designs and assembles about 50 kitchens a year. We would like to increase our production and that is why we are currently looking for some new carpenters. www.plan3.pro