From a French workshop to a workshop in Malaga
Perth Kitchen Crafters is Vincent Mayer, a French-trained master cabinet maker with a workshop in Malaga, who decided that the people drawing a kitchen should be the people making it, and built a team around that.
Trained in France, making kitchens in Perth
Vincent trained for three years as a cabinet maker in France, in the tradition where the person who designs a piece is the person who builds it, and where a drawer is judged by how it closes twenty years on. He came to Perth and worked in the high end of the trade here, making furniture and cabinetry to other people’s designs.
It showed him the same thing every time: the client paid for a showroom and a sales team, the drawing went to a factory that had never met them, and the install was done by someone reading a stranger’s plan. Everything good about a piece was lost in the handovers.
So he set up his own workshop in Malaga, where the drawing, the making and the fitting happen under one roof. We call it Direct by Design.
Recognised for a table
In December 2019 the Castellane dining table, which Vincent designed and made at Arqadian Furniture in Perth, was recognised by the Australian Furniture Association with its Master Designer Creative Vision award: a jarrah top on sculpted crossed legs, with chairs drawn to match it.
A table is a kitchen in miniature: proportion, joinery, and a surface that has to survive a family. The habits that won that award are the ones in every kitchen we make.
A kitchen of his own
In 2021 Vincent and his wife bought a 1970s house in Greenwood with a floor plan nobody else wanted and a living room that wanted to be the kitchen. He moved the kitchen into it, found a cavity in a wall and made it a hidden pantry, and built the island around the way a pastry chef works.
That kitchen has its own page, and it is where most of the photographs on this site were taken.
The team
Margot Hennequin, an interior designer trained in France, works with you on the design and is your point of contact through the job. An apprentice is learning the trade in the workshop. Other cabinet makers join us on site and in the workshop when a job needs more hands.
It is a small team by design, and it is growing. The people you talk to are the people who make your kitchen.
Start a kitchen with us
No showroom. A free visit to your house with the samples. A quote priced from every cabinet’s parts, on the spot or within 48 hours. Drawings you walk through in 3D and approve before a sheet is cut. Four to six weeks in the workshop, then the install by the team that made it.
Five years on the cabinetry, in writing. It is a small business by design, so we say early whether we can fit yours in.