A digital designer, a furniture maker and the drill holes on an IKEA door.

Plykea is a London company that makes plywood doors, drawer fronts, worktops and cover panels designed to fit IKEA’s kitchen and wardrobe cabinets. It was founded by Tim Diacon and Adam Vergette. Dezeen, reporting on the company on 12 May 2017, said it was set up after Diacon renovated his own kitchen and struggled to find bespoke cabinet doors in the material he wanted at an affordable price, and that he teamed up with Vergette, a furniture designer and former head of production at the furniture brand Vitsoe. The Organized Home, part of the Remodelista group, described the pair on 23 May 2017 as a digital product designer and a furniture designer. Plykea’s own footer says its products have been made in London since 2016.

The founders’ account of the start is a practical one. In words quoted by The Organized Home from the Plykea website at the time, Diacon wrote that while renovating his house he wanted a quick way to create a good kitchen on a limited budget; having installed an IKEA kitchen before, he trusted the cabinets but loved the look of birch plywood and wanted it for the fronts. The online options, he wrote, were either clunky, short on material choice or too expensive, so he turned to his friend Adam, who knew how to make fronts that would fit perfectly and stand up to a toddler. Diacon wrote that he thanked Vergette with a beer, over which the two hatched a plan. Here East’s directory of its tenants still describes Plykea as co-founded by two friends.

The method was direct. Diacon told Dezeen in 2017 that he had assumed it would be easy to find a company supplying plywood fronts for IKEA but could not find one, and that the pair went to IKEA, bought one of its cheapest fronts, measured it precisely, including all the drill holes, and then CNC-cut their own. At that point, Dezeen reported, Plykea supplied parts only for IKEA’s Metod kitchen cabinets; it had received queries about IKEA’s Pax wardrobes but intended to concentrate on kitchens. Diacon summed up the offer to the magazine simply: “What we add essentially is choice.”

Birch plywood cut by CNC and finished by hand, in Hackney Wick and San Francisco.

Plykea makes its products itself. Its UK homepage says every front starts with a birch plywood core, is CNC-cut and is then hand-finished by its team at its London workshop. The fronts are made to fit IKEA’s Metod or Pax cabinets, using the same hinge cups and fixing holes as standard IKEA doors, and everything is made to order, so non-standard sizes and unusual cover panels can be made. The company states on its pages that it is independent and not affiliated with IKEA.

The early range was narrow. The Organized Home wrote in May 2017 that the fronts could be faced in birch, oak or walnut, that Plykea finished each item with two coats of Osmo clear hard-wax oil, and that it offered three handle types, including a brass pull. Dezeen added Formica-faced plywood doors, cut-out handles in round or rectangular shapes, and wooden spacer panels to sit between cupboards. Real Homes, writing on 16 October 2018, described the business as an upscaling service that transforms IKEA Metod kitchens with plywood fronts and worktops.

The London base moved to Here East, the campus in Hackney Wick, east London. A news item on Here East’s website says Plykea chose the campus as the home of its new London flagship design studio, workshop and kitchen showroom, that a Plykea team had earlier been based in Plexal, the innovation centre on the campus, and that the company had launched its first standalone product, a modular shelving system called Ürtil. Plykea’s showroom page says visitors enter through its in-house production facility and can see orders being made.

America came next. The Organized Home reported in 2017 that the founders hoped to launch in San Francisco and ship across the US. Plykea’s US website now says its fronts are hand-finished in its San Francisco workshop and made to fit IKEA’s Sektion and Pax cabinets, and the company says it makes every piece by hand in its London and San Francisco workshops.

Design and documentation.

Kitchen cabinet and kitchen-system brands sit at many different points in the trade, from workshops that build a single kitchen to order to factories that make modular systems sold through showrooms in many countries, and from firms that make the whole room to companies that make only the doors and fronts that fit another maker’s cabinet frames.

A kitchen brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a way of planning a room: a grid, a handle, a finish, a run of named colours, a showroom and the designers whose names are attached to it. Because the company behind a name may have changed hands, moved its workshop or begun buying in parts, the plain questions are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its cabinets are actually built.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its kitchens are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand built on the visible edge and an honest relationship with IKEA.

The most recognisable element of Plykea’s look is a construction detail. Its homepage says that, as standard, the plywood edges are left exposed, so the layered birch shows on every door and drawer front. The company pairs that edge with faces in natural veneers or coloured laminates, and its site invites customers to order samples and request a quote and a 2D visual before committing.

The brand’s voice is plain and first-person. The homepage section headed “Born from a problem we had ourselves” says the founders started Plykea because they wanted well-made plywood kitchen fronts and worktops, could not find them, and so built a workshop and made them. It is the same story Diacon told the design press in 2017, kept almost unchanged as the company grew from one city to two. Its UK and US sites share layout and wording, adjusting only for local terms such as worktops and countertops and for the IKEA cabinet ranges sold in each market.

Plykea’s relationship with IKEA is central to the identity and carefully stated. The company’s pages describe its products as built around IKEA cabinets and compatible with them, and repeat that it is independent and not affiliated with IKEA. The name makes the same point in one word, joining plywood to the retailer whose cabinet system the company was designed to fit. The showroom carries the idea of openness into the physical brand: at Here East, the route to the display kitchens runs through the workshop itself.

For a design guide, Plykea shows how a small maker can build an identity on an exposed material, a founder’s story and a clear line between itself and the larger brand it works with. Compare IKEA, whose cabinets Plykea’s fronts are made to fit, and Reform, the Copenhagen company that also designs fronts for IKEA kitchens. For this guide we use laminate green, birch ply, terracotta and workshop ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Plykea’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.