What we are still happily specifying
Fluted and reeded fronts keep earning their place because they hide fingerprints and add texture without pattern fatigue. Timber veneer over flat laminate is another keep: it ages, and that is the point. On the practical side, induction with integrated extraction finally works well enough that we stopped recommending separate rangehoods in most plans.
Walk-in pantries, even a 90-centimetre one, remain the single highest-value inclusion clients thank us for later.
The ones fading out
All-white kitchens are quietly exiting. Not because white is wrong, but because clients stopped wanting to live inside a fridge. Warm neutrals, mushroom tones and deep colour on the island are taking over.
Waterfall benchtop ends are also slowing down. They read as 2018 now, and they cost a slab and a half for a detail most people stop noticing after a month.
Design the bin, the pantry and the charging drawer first. Those are the details you touch ten times a day.
Two trends we would skip
First: handleless push-to-open doors on every cabinet. They look clean in photos and drive owners mad in year two when the mechanisms loosen. We still use them, but selectively, on the uppers you touch twice a week.
Second: the fully open-shelf kitchen. Unless you own a matching set of beautiful cookware and enjoy dusting it, open shelving trades storage for a look. One display run of shelving, fine. A whole wall of it, no.
What we would tell a friend
Spend on the things you touch: tapware, drawer hardware, benchtops. Save on the things you look at: cabinet fronts can be mid-range if the layout is good. And design the bin, the pantry and the charging drawer first, because those are the details you will interact with ten times a day.
Our kitchen design service covers all of this with drawings any joiner can price.
