Why Andrew Hays is in the Design 100

Andrew Hays arrived at kitchen design sideways. Trained in architecture but drawn early to live performance, he spent years designing sets and costumes for opera houses in Venice, Verona, London and Sydney — a theatrical grounding that resurfaced when he became creative director at Poggenpohl and Smallbone, and later co-founded Arteim with Kimm Kovac, a studio built on narrative and materiality rather than conventional joinery logic.

That sensibility became a business in 2019, when Hays launched Cabbonet to meet the demand Arteim’s bespoke kitchens had already generated. Rather than treating a kitchen as plumbing and cabinetry, Cabbonet designs it as a stage set — proportion, shadow and material doing the work that props and lighting once did. It is a small, specific correction to how the industry usually talks about kitchens, and reason enough for a place in this index.