The Carrera of cooking

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.

Bring me a sandwich, fool! Hah-hah-hah!

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

If cool, nocturnal and sinister are what you're looking for in kitchen cabinetry, then 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, all framed in brushed aluminum. 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 at the Poggenpohl showroom at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood earlier this month.

Porsche Design and Poggenpohl call this the Kitchen for Men, a notion that is as deliberately provocative as it is a fairly clever bit of marketing. The premise seems to be that with male gonads comes a love of the super sleek, the maximally minimal, the rigorously rectangular. This generally describes the Weltanschauung of Porsche Design, whose hugely successful men's accessories business -- sunglasses, clothing, luggage, timepieces -- seems to be aimed at skinny Berliners named Dieter.

I grant that this kitchen would be Martha Stewart's idea of hell. I further grant that it is, in a highly restrictive sense, 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 motorized cinch mechanism that pulls the doors for the last centimeters.

Further dude-itude is embodied in the integral appliances -- convection, microwave and steam ovens, glass-top stove, and automatic coffee and espresso machine/death-ray -- all offered in the 8-millimeter aluminum-framed rectangles and black-glass fascia. According to Ted Chappell, chief executive of Poggenpohl U.S., the sample kitchen at the Pacific Design Center would run about $75,000.

Of course, since it's aimed at men, the kitchen has to have a grandiose TV, an LCD-based multimedia center 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.