Spec 02 · The IKEA kitchen parts list
I’ve had so much interest and so many questions about my kitchen since sharing it online. I wrote this guide as an in depth answer to what my kitchen is, how it was made, what components are in it and roughly the time and costs involved. I hope you find it valuable.
These are the actual parts, in the order they went in. Prices are what I paid or what the item lists for on ikea.com.au in August 2026, and IKEA moves its prices, so treat them as a starting point and not as a quote.
| Element | What I used | Cost | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Floor | Large format bluestone tileLaid in a stack bond grid to complement the geometry of the island drawers. Darkened and sealed with a colour enhancer | ~$4,500 materials | |
| Benchtop | 6 mm (¼″) solid 304 stainless, waterfall edge, fabricated by meQuoted at $16,000. Built for $4,500 | $4,500 | |
| Sink | IKEA VRESJÖN inset sink, 54x44 cm (21¼ x 17⅜″), glued into a cut holeArt. 405.046.16 · the cheap call, and I would make it again | $219 | |
| Lower cabinets | IKEA METOD frames with MAXIMERA drawersMETOD base frame 40 cm (15¾″) $90 · 60 cm (23⅝″) $100 · 80 cm (31½″) $110 | from $90 ea | |
| Lower fronts | IKEA VÅRSTA stainless steel drawer fronts60x20 (23⅝ x 7⅞″) $60 · 60x40 (23⅝ x 15¾″) $70 · 80x40 (31½ x 15¾″) $75 · see the flag below | $55 to $75 | |
| Upper cabinets | IKEA HAVSTORP in brown-beige, no handlesDoor 40x80 $50 · 60x80 $60 · UTRUSTA push opener 2-pack $15 | $50 to $60 ea | |
| Splashback | Dark grey mirror, 3.6 metres (11 ft 10 in), fitted by me in an hourThe supplier wanted $3,000 to fit it | $1,400 | |
| Pipe stack | Boxed with a radius, clad in floor bluestone cut into thin finger stripsSame stone as the floor in a different format, so it follows the curve. Offcuts plus one day of labour | 1 day + offcuts | |
| Walls | Bauwerk lime wash, 2 to 3 coatsAround $300 of product where basic paint would have been $100. Low skill, high patience | ~$300 |
How I am rating difficulty
Every VÅRSTA product on the Australian IKEA site currently carries a Last chance label, which is what IKEA puts on a range it is clearing out. The UK site still lists the range with no such label, and in the United States there is no VÅRSTA at all, so a SEKTION kitchen uses NOGSTA instead. If you are in Australia and you want stainless fronts from IKEA, I would go and look at stock this week rather than next month. There is a section further down on what I would use instead once it goes.
Two things to know before you spend anything. VÅRSTA is not solid stainless. It is a particleboard panel about 16 mm (⅝″) thick with a stainless face on the front, which is how it lands at $70 instead of several hundred. It looks right and it wears reasonably, and it will dent where solid steel would not.
And do not ring a local fabricator expecting these numbers. IKEA can sell a stainless front for $70 because they make them in enormous quantities, and a fab shop making a handful for you is going to be three or four times that. The price is a function of volume, so it is available to you only while you are willing to buy what IKEA already decided to make.
The part that actually decides how your kitchen feels is not on that list. It is in how those parts sit next to each other, and it is on the next screen.
From my perspective, this is a designer kitchen built on a budget.
The whole kitchen cost me roughly AUD $17,000, largely because I designed and built it myself. The IKEA cabinetry was the biggest expense at around $10,000, followed by the benchtops and flooring at roughly $4,000 each.
Everything else is relatively inexpensive. Paint is cheap. LED strip lighting is cheap. IKEA cabinet doors are cheap compared with bespoke joinery.
A builder friend of mine estimated that having an equivalent kitchen designed and built professionally would start at around $50,000.
But I don't think expensive materials are what make this kitchen feel expensive.
The expensive part is the relationship between them.
The colour of the cabinetry against the stainless steel. The way the steel repeats across different surfaces. The dark floor underneath it. The warm light washing across otherwise inexpensive materials.
None of these things are particularly special on their own. They become special because of how they are composed.
That's the part of design that interests me most. You don't necessarily need more expensive materials. You need to understand what each material is doing to the perception of the ones around it.
The lighting is a good example. LED strip itself is incredibly inexpensive if you know how to specify and install it. I made a simple guide showing exactly how I do it. Get the guide.
The palette · eight materials, nothing else
Every surface in this room is one of these. Part of what makes a small palette work is that you stop noticing the individual items and start noticing how they sit together.
The upper cabinets are HAVSTORP in brown-beige, which is painted fibreboard costing $50 to $60 a door. On their own they are a warm neutral cupboard. Put them within a metre of a genuine stainless benchtop and something happens to how you read them, because your eye takes the cue from the steel and starts filing the beige as aluminium. I did not fully expect this and it is the single cheapest trick in the room.
If it were me I would test this before committing. Hold the door sample against a piece of actual steel in the daylight you will actually have, and not against a white wall in a showroom.
The bluestone is a large format tile and it was not expensive. I went with it because it feels more like a hotel lobby from the 1970s than anything most houses have, and because the size and the natural character of the stone give you a lot to enjoy underfoot. I also knew I could take it from the standard mid-grey of bluestone to a deep dark grey with a colour enhancer, which is what lets it sit under a bright metal bench and contrast it instead of blending into it. A pale floor with a stainless bench gives you a room full of light grey where nothing is the subject.
There is a pipe stack in the middle of the benchtop that had to be boxed in. The easy move is to plasterboard it and paint it, which introduces a new material to a room that already has enough going on. I used the floor stone, so the eye reads it as a continuation of the material palette. Consistency instead of busyness, which is a lot of what reads as refined.
The box has a big radius on it rather than square corners, which softens the light wrapping around it and takes up less bench space, so you do not have a hard edge sitting in the middle of where you work. Large format tile will not follow a curve, so I cut the same bluestone into thin finger strips and wrapped it. Same stone, different format. The stack ends up related to the floor without being a copy of it, and the strips give you a fluted texture that catches the light quite differently as you move past it.
If you want a room to feel more considered, you usually need at least one surface with real material character. The question is where that money will have the most effect.
Cabinet fronts are an expensive place to buy that character. Moving from a standard IKEA finish to something like real walnut veneer can add thousands of dollars, while the walls and ceiling give you a much larger surface to work with for relatively little money.
In my kitchen, I wanted a balance between rough, cave-like texture and clean, modern built surfaces. So I kept the cabinetry simple and spent more on the walls instead.
The cupboard finish is satin, which gives it a gentle reflection from the side. If every surface in the room were smooth and refined in the same way, the kitchen would start to feel thin. It needed something rougher and more substantial to push against it, and the wall was the largest available surface.
We limewashed it with Bauwerk. Two or three coats cost about $300 in product, compared with perhaps $100 for ordinary paint. That small increase gave an entire wall a depth and texture that would have been much more expensive to achieve through upgraded cabinetry.
Spending more on the cupboard doors would have been equally valid. It would simply produce a different room. I wanted this one to feel monumental and slightly cave-like, so the wall needed to carry that feeling.
A useful way to think about budget is not simply, “Which item should I upgrade?” It is, “Which surface can carry the character of the room most efficiently?” Sometimes the cheapest answer is to leave the cabinetry ordinary and spend the money on the much larger surfaces around it.
You never really see a material on its own. You see the light it reflects.
That means lighting is not something I add after choosing the finishes. It is part of deciding how those finishes will actually be perceived.
The satin cupboard doors become gently reflective when light moves across them. The limewash becomes much more textured when light grazes the wall. The stainless steel picks up whatever is around it, so controlling what it reflects matters almost as much as choosing the steel itself.
This is why I generally prefer to hide the source of the light and think instead about where the light lands. I am usually trying to light a surface, and let that surface light the room.
In the kitchen there is a practical reason for this too. A continuous strip above the bench gives you an even field of light across the entire work surface, rather than a few bright points that your body can interrupt and cast shadows beneath.
I wrote the lighting system up separately because there is quite a lot behind something that looks very simple.
Spec 01 covers the lighting, and it is free.
Roughly how it went in, with what I would tell you about each one if you rang me about it.
The tile itself was about $2,000. The rest of that $4,500 is glues, slab prep and the concrete, because I raised the floor level and poured a new slab as part of this. That is worth separating out, because a contractor doing the same work would have been $25,000 at the very least, and it is the single biggest gap in the whole kitchen between what it cost me and what it would have cost to buy.
Large format tile is not expensive to buy and it is genuinely hard to lay, because any dip in the slab shows up as a lipped edge you will feel with your foot for the next thirty years. I laid it in a stack bond grid so the joints line up with the geometry of the island drawers, and finished it with a colour enhancer to take the stone from its natural mid-grey down to a deep dark grey.
If it were me and I had not laid large format before, this is the one I would hand to a tiler and spend my own labour elsewhere.
Every lower cabinet is drawers. No cupboard doors anywhere below the bench, which is the single change I would make to any kitchen regardless of budget, because a drawer comes out to you and a cupboard makes you get down on the floor and reach past three things to find the fourth.
There is a happy accident in the IKEA range here. VÅRSTA is only made as drawer fronts and dishwasher fronts, and no door was ever produced, so a stainless METOD kitchen has to be an all-drawer kitchen. The constraint pushed me toward the layout I would have chosen anyway.
The lowers do have handles, which is worth saying because the uppers do not. A drawer you open with a full hand under load wants something to grip, and a slim round bar in stainless sits quietly against a stainless front while still giving you a proper hold. The handleless trick is for the top line of the room where your eye travels. Down at the bench it costs you more than it gives.
METOD base frame, white: 40 cm (15¾″) $90 · 60 cm (23⅝″) $100 · 80 cm (31½″) $110. Drawers, legs, plinth, suspension rail and handles are all priced separately, which is the part of an IKEA kitchen budget that catches people out.
Out of order, and my own fault: I fitted this before the benchtop went in. Do the bench first, then bring the mirror down to meet it, or you will be cutting the last piece to fit a gap you already built. This is the one that surprises people. A 3.6 metre (11 ft 10 in) run of dark grey mirror cost me $1,400 supplied. The supplier quoted an additional $3,000 to install it, and I put it up myself in about an hour.
I rate it two out of five, which is the same rating I gave hanging cabinet doors. It is heavy and it is unforgiving about the wall being flat, and beyond that it is patience and a second pair of hands. There is no specialist tool and no licence involved.
Now the part that actually matters, because it is a design decision and not an installation one. A mirror has no colour of its own. Mine reads as flat black almost all the time, and that is not the product, it is the room: dark cabinetry opposite it, low warm light, nothing busy in front of it. Up close the camera picks up a green cast off the glass while everything around it stays warm, which is the only clue that it is grey rather than black.
Here is that same splashback with clothes racks in front of it. It is raining and we have a baby, so this is a normal week rather than a disaster. But it shows the thing to plan for: a mirror hands you whatever is standing opposite it, at full size, in the middle of your kitchen.
So before you order one, go and stand where the mirror will be and look at what is behind you. If that view is your pantry shelves, your laundry or the back of a sofa covered in washing, a mirror will double it. If it is a wall, a window with something worth seeing, or a quiet part of the room, a mirror will give you depth for $1,400.
Reflective materials do not have an appearance. They have a room. When you specify steel or mirror you are really specifying whatever stands opposite it.
I am not going to write out the exact adhesive and method here, because getting it wrong on a $1,400 sheet is an expensive way to learn and it depends a lot on your wall. If you are about to do one, email me and I will tell you what I used and the two things I would do differently.
This is the expensive item and it is the one people ask about second. Published Australian rates for a fabricated stainless benchtop run roughly $1,200 to $3,600 per linear metre installed, and a waterfall end typically adds another $1,500 to $4,000 on top of that regardless of material. My quote of $16,000 sits inside that range rather than above it, so it was not an unreasonable quote. It was simply more than I was willing to pay for something I believed I could build.
There are three ways you can go here. (1) The full version, which is a fabricated top with a waterfall return, welded and polished, and either you have metalwork skills or you are paying five figures. (2) A flat stainless sheet cut to size and laid straight onto a standard bench, which loses the waterfall, keeps almost all of the look, and drops the cost to a fraction. The waterfall is the part you are really paying for. (3) A middle option I like: lay the flat sheet, then mount a separate vertical face of steel down the end with about a 5 mm (³⁄₁₆″) shadow line between the two sheets. You get the full height of metal without the fabrication, and it reads a little more industrial, which may be exactly what you want.
The thing to know before you ring a fabricator is that gauge and grade set the price more than area does. Almost every stainless benchtop sold in Australia is roughly 1 mm (0.04″) steel folded around a whiteboard core, and that includes the ones in commercial kitchens. Solid plate is an architectural thing, and mine is 6 mm (¼″) solid 304. Those two objects share a name and very little else, so ask what thickness they are quoting, ask for 304, and ask how the edge is formed before you compare any two prices.
Sheet widths, and why your bench is not 600 deep
Steel comes in fixed sheet widths. In Australia that is 1200 or 1220 mm (47¼ or 48″), or 1500 mm (59″). Your benchtop is a strip cut from one of those sheets, so the depth of your bench is really a decision about how many strips a sheet gives you. A 1220 by 2440 sheet (4 by 8 ft) rips into two strips at 608 mm (24″), which sounds perfect for a bench on a 600 mm (23⅝″) cabinet.
Except benches are not 600 deep. The cabinet is 600, the front sits proud of it, and the top ideally overhangs the drawers by 10 to 20 mm (⅜ to ¾″) so a spill drips onto the floor instead of into your cutlery. Add it up honestly and a wall bench wants to be 620 to 640 mm (24⅜ to 25¼″) deep. You can claw some of that back by using the splashback to pack the bench out from the wall, which is a legitimate move, but make it consciously rather than discovering it when the top goes on.
Mine has almost no overhang, and that was a cost decision. A proper overhang meant a 630 to 640 mm (24¾ to 25¼″) strip, and at that width a 1220 sheet gives you one strip instead of two, so the choice was another sheet of steel at about $1,000 or being careful with spills. The move I did not think of at ordering time was the 1500 mm (59″) sheet, which rips into two strips at 750 mm (29½″) and covers the overhang easily. Think of it before you order. I took the compromise instead.
The same trap nearly caught the island. I planned that top at 970 mm (38¼″) wide, because a 600 cabinet back to back with a 370 mm (14⅝″) cabinet is 970. But the IKEA dimensions are the carcass only. The drawer fronts are not counted, and they add roughly 20 mm (¾″) a side, so a double sided island is 1010 mm (39¾″) minimum before you have allowed for any overhang at all. Measure a front, not the catalogue, before the steel is cut.
I cut a hole and glued a drop-in sink into it. It is the IKEA VRESJÖN, 54 by 44 centimetres (21¼ by 17⅜″), single bowl, $219 at the time of writing. A few people in the comments told me that a properly made steel bench has the sink welded in and polished flush, and they are right that this is the better piece of craft. It is also several hundred dollars and a skill I do not have.
Knowing where to spend craft and where to trade it away is most of what makes a small budget work. I spent mine on the waterfall edge, which you see from across the room, and traded it at the sink, which you look into while doing dishes. A few months in and I have not thought about it once, which is the review a sink wants.
A stack of three fronts on a 60 cm (23⅝″) cabinet comes to about $200, which is the cheapest way I know to get real stainless into a kitchen. As above, the panel behind the steel face is particleboard, so treat it as a faced panel and not as solid metal.
Worth repeating because people get caught by it: you cannot get this price from a fabricator. IKEA makes these in enormous volume, and a metal shop making a small run for you will be three or four times the cost.
One small thing on the handles, since they arrive with the fronts. IKEA supplies little standoff knobs that hold the bar off the face of the drawer. I left them off and mounted the bar straight down onto the steel, because the knobs read as extra hardware on a front whose whole job is to be one flat plane. It is a two minute decision and it is the difference between a handle that sits on the drawer and a handle that sits above it.
The thing nobody tells you about stainless is that it does not really have a colour. It is a mirror with a grain in it, so what you see is whatever is standing in front of it. In my room, which is dark floor, dark splashback and low warm light, the fronts read as deep charcoal with a warm streak down them, and people are often surprised when I say they are the silver ones from the catalogue. Put the same front in a white room with a window opposite and it will look like a fridge.
So if you are choosing from a showroom photograph, you are choosing the showroom. Take a sample home and stand it where the run will actually go.
Current Australian sizes and prices, in cm: 40x20 (15¾ x 7⅞″) $55 · 40x40 (15¾ x 15¾″) $65 · 60x20 (23⅝ x 7⅞″) $60 · 60x40 (23⅝ x 15¾″) $70 · 80x20 (31½ x 7⅞″) $65 · 80x40 (31½ x 15¾″) $75. All flagged Last chance in August 2026.
Push to open instead of handles, because handles put a row of hardware across the highest line in the room and that line is the one your eye follows when you walk in. Take the handles off and the top of the kitchen goes quiet.
The part to get right when you order is that IKEA's UTRUSTA push opener is made for doors. It is a small sprung unit that mounts inside the carcass alongside the ordinary hinges, and at $15 a pair it is good value given it is doing the job a set of handles would otherwise be doing and getting paid for. Push to open on drawers is a different product entirely, so if you are planning handleless drawers, check what is actually available in your country before you design around it.
Mine sits in the middle of the benchtop, which is the worst place for one. Boxing it in is straightforward framing, and then there are two decisions worth copying.
The first is what you clad it with. My rule is that an obstruction gets finished in a material already in the room. Introduce a fourth material to solve a small problem and you have drawn attention to the thing you were trying to make disappear.
The second is the radius. I gave the box a generous curve instead of square arrises, which softens the light coming around it and hands back a bit of bench space. A hard edged column in the middle of a work surface reads as an obstacle. A rounded one reads as part of the bench.
Those two decisions fight each other, because a 600 mm (23⅝″) floor tile will not bend. So I cut the bluestone into thin finger strips, maybe the width of two fingers, and wrapped them around the curve with the joints running vertically. It is the same stone as the floor in a completely different format, which is the part I would want you to take away. The discipline is not "use the same material everywhere". It is: keep the material, and change its format when the geometry asks you to. Reaching for a new material is the easy answer, and it is the one that makes a room feel busy.
What I did not expect is how much the strips improved it. The vertical joints read as fluting, so the light rakes across the ribs and the stack has more going on than the flat floor does, while still obviously being the same stone. It has turned into one of my favourite things in the room and it started as a plumbing problem.
I used Bauwerk, two to three coats. It goes on with a wide brush in loose crossing strokes, it is meant to look uneven, and being slightly bad at it produces a better result than being careful about it.
I have rated this a two rather than a one, because the skill required is genuinely low but the patience required is not. It is several coats, it is slow, and it costs more in both product and hours than rolling paint on. It is worth every bit of that, and I would rather you went in knowing.
Do this last, after the cabinetry is in, so you can see where the light actually falls before you decide how heavy to work the texture in each part of the room.
Last job in the room, and deliberately so. The strip goes in after the lime wash is finished, because the whole point of it is to graze a surface you have already made, and you cannot judge where to aim it while that surface is still wet plaster and drop sheets. Fit it early and you will be guessing.
It is also the cheapest thing here by a wide margin and the one doing the most work. Extrusion, diffuser, strip and a driver, glued and screwed into place, and the source stays hidden so what you see is the light landing rather than the fitting.
Spec 01 covers the lighting properly, including what to specify and how to install it, and it is free.
The real questions from the comments, roughly in the order people voted for them with likes. Open the ones you care about.
A thick metal rail clamped down as a guide, then a really shallow first pass as straight as you can make it, then the rest of the depth in multiple passes, cleaned up with a flap disc and an orbital sander. The pressure of it being my own island got me properly locked in. I was sweating the whole time. A laser cutter would obviously be better, but you genuinely cannot tell these edges were cut by hand.
And show my dodgy cutting skills? I think not. The serious version: a top mounted sink hides a hand cut hole under its rim, and an undermount exposes the cut edge, which means routing to a template and polishing it perfect. That is fabricator territory. Decide who is cutting the hole before you decide how the sink mounts.
Glues and screws, baby. The panels are fixed mechanically as well as bonded, so the kettle can do its worst.
I am not the best welder, so: weld, grind it flat, weld a little more to fill the holes, grind it flat again. The grinding is flap discs on a rubber backing pad, 40 grit up to 120. A grinder only spins in one direction and leaves big circles in the metal, so the finish comes from a random orbital sander, 80 grit up to 240, changing pads constantly. Stainless clogs sandpaper unbelievably fast. We bought 25 discs of each grit for one benchtop, and that was about right. Buy more than seems reasonable or you will be sanding forever.
It is the commercial kitchen material because it is hard wearing and easy to sanitise, and that carries straight into a house. Hot pans go directly onto it. It scratches rather than stains, so where certain stones mark permanently, steel just picks up texture, and if that ever bothers us we resand it back to new. It puts nothing extra near food, which matters to me because a lot of modern benchtops are composites and I do not love the idea of microplastics under my chopping board. One honest note for cool climates: the steel runs cold. Excellent for pastry, for prep and for parking a drink. Not lovely under a laptop. And my wife is a chef. A steel bench reads to her as a kitchen that takes cooking seriously, and that is worth more than any point on this list.
I could not make a saw behave. The blade walked off my rail more than once, and stainless work hardens: it is soft until it heats up, and then it gets really hard, and any section you let overheat needs the grinder to finish anyway. Some of it was user error, coming into the cut too fast. Test your saw on an off-cut before you commit either way. The grinder is simple and cheap. The dust is the real enemy, so wear a respirator, and the rest is patience. The easier version of all of this is to have the sheet laser cut for you. You just need a CAD drawing of it.
One school says never. Working architects in the same thread said they do it constantly. Ours is in the island because that is where the plumbing, the light and the person washing up all wanted to be, and it is the right call for this room. Treat any design rule that arrives as a manifesto with suspicion.
No, with one condition. Stainless rusts at a cut if the disc carries iron particles from mild steel it cut earlier. Fresh discs for stainless, always, and it stays stainless.
About a month. The whole house took 104 days and the kitchen was roughly a third of that, running alongside everything else.
No coating, and yes it shows marks. That is the deal, and it is the same deal as the scratches: I sometimes cut directly on the bench and did not want anything between the food and the steel. The marks become the surface, and if we ever stop liking them, we resand.
Since the Australian range is on its way out, here is what I would do instead, in the order I would consider it. I have not built a kitchen with any of these, so take it as a designer telling you where he would start looking rather than as tested advice.
Buy the range while it is there. Boring answer, best answer. If you are within a year of doing your kitchen, buying and storing the fronts now is cheaper than every option below.
Have plain fronts wrapped in real stainless. There are metal shops in Australia that sheet existing cabinet doors and drawer fronts in brushed stainless with the corners welded and polished. Supply them cheap flat fronts cut to METOD sizes and you end up with something better made than VÅRSTA was, since it is actual steel rather than a faced panel. It is quote only, so ring with your sizes and find out.
Stainless laminate on a raw substrate. Brushed stainless high pressure laminate sells for about $370 a sheet ex GST, and one sheet covers roughly eighteen drawer fronts at 60 by 40 cm (23⅝ by 15¾″). Two things to know before you commit. The finish is directional, so every panel has to be laid the same way or they will read as different colours across the run. And the product is generally positioned for kickboards rather than for surfaces you touch fifty times a day, so I would ask the supplier directly about a drawer front application before ordering.
Custom fronts from an Australian METOD door maker. Several companies make doors and drawer fronts to fit IKEA carcasses, starting around $25 to $35 a front for laminate or raw MDF and running up past $250 for two pack. None of the ones I looked at list a stainless finish, but raw MDF from one of them is the ideal substrate for either of the two options above.
If the material you wanted disappears, the design brief does not change. You still need something cool, flat and gently reflective below a warm wall.
The most useful thing you can do at the beginning of a kitchen project is decide what actually needs to carry the design.
You do not need every surface to be special. Trying to upgrade everything is usually how budgets disappear without the room becoming much better.
Start with these decisions.
Not the style. The feeling. Warm, quiet, monolithic, bright, soft, industrial, cave-like, precise.
This gives you something to judge every later decision against. Instead of asking whether you like a material on its own, you can ask whether it contributes to the room you are trying to make.
It might be the floor, the walls, the benchtop or the cabinetry. Put your money there, and allow the surrounding finishes to become simpler.
In my kitchen, the walls and stainless benchtop do most of the work. That meant the cupboard fronts could be relatively ordinary. Spending heavily on every surface would not necessarily have made the room feel any more resolved.
Do not choose finishes from a screen. Get physical samples of everything you are seriously considering and put them together in the actual room. Put the cupboard finish beside the benchtop. Put the wall finish beside the floor. Move them around. Look at them in morning light, afternoon light and at night.
Everyone knows they should get real samples, and it is still incredibly easy to get impatient and skip this step. I sometimes do it myself. Almost every time I do, I regret it. Don’t.
Colour, texture and reflection are all difficult to judge accurately on a screen. A material that looks beautiful by itself can feel completely wrong once it sits beside another one. Be patient. Collect the samples. Play with them together. Live with the combination for a few days before committing. It is one of the easiest ways to avoid expensive amateur mistakes.
Before changing the layout, pay attention to what annoys you now. What do you reach for constantly? What is buried at the back of a cupboard? Where do you prepare food? Where does someone inevitably stand while you are trying to cook?
A good kitchen is not only a composition of beautiful materials. It should quietly remove these small frustrations.
You never really see a material independently of the light falling on it. A textured wall behaves differently when light grazes across it. Satin cabinetry becomes reflective from certain angles. Stainless steel picks up whatever surrounds it. Your lighting is therefore part of the material composition, not something to solve after everything else has been chosen.
For work surfaces, it is also functional. You want light arriving in a way that your own body cannot block while you cook.
Once these things are clear, choosing products becomes much easier. You are no longer asking, “What kitchen should I buy?”
You are deciding what you want the room to feel like, where that feeling will come from, where the money should go, and what everything else needs to do in support of it.
Everything in this guide is what I did in my own kitchen. What it cannot do is tell you what your room wants.
If you want my judgement on your own work, that is what the coaching is for. Once a month I get on a call, members bring me whatever they are working on — a kitchen, a garden, a whole renovation, or a drawing they cannot tell is any good — and I answer the questions they have voted up. The call is recorded and written up, so the answers keep working long after the hour is over.
You also get everything I publish, including the paid guides. An hour of my design consulting starts at $300, so I am well aware of how twenty-five dollars a month looks next to that. The difference is that this is a group and nothing in it is private.
The first hundred members keep that price for as long as they stay.
Put your email in and I will send you this guide as a print ready PDF you can take to IKEA, along with the adhesive and method I used on the mirror splashback and the two things I would do differently.
That also puts you on Lach's Letters, which is a weekly letter from me about designing spaces properly. One click gets you off it and I will not be offended.
Australia, and anywhere else. The IKEA prices are Australian, and everything else applies wherever you are.
Every guide is a real thing I built at WANN House, written up with the numbers left in.
Who wrote this
Lach Wann
I am a fourth generation gardener who has spent the last 16 years working in spatial design, and WANN House is my own renovation. I am building it in public and writing up each part as I finish it, which means everything in this guide is a thing I paid for and installed rather than a thing I read about.