Quick answer
For developers, townhouse kitchens are usually larger, ground-loaded and run as repeatable per-unit fit-outs, while apartment kitchens hinge on lift access, shared venting and body corporate rules. MTN Kitchens handles both across Auckland with supply-and-install and trade pricing on volume specs.
Key points
- Apartments and townhouses are two different kitchen jobs from the first quote to the last handover. Treat them the same and you slip your programme.
- Five things decide it: layout, access, services, scheduling and spec. Sort them on the drawings, not on site.
- Access is the sharpest split: a goods lift and booked slot in a tower versus a stair carry unit by unit in a terrace. Measure the path, not just the room.
- Lock one spec early and hold it. Spec drift mid-run means two material orders, two templates and a buyer asking why their kitchen looks cheaper.
- Supply and install under one contract kills the variation nobody owns. MTN quotes in 24 hours, runs 10-plus kitchens a week, installs in 5 to 7 days.
Same kitchen, two different jobs.
On paper a kitchen is a kitchen. On site, a stack of apartments in the city and a row of townhouses out in Flat Bush are two different jobs from the first quote to the last handover. Developers who treat them the same get caught the same way. The goods lift will not take a pre-built island up to level eight. A benchtop that looked sharp in the showhome adds twenty grand across forty units. The install crew turns up and the floor is not weathertight, so they stand around or go home. The kitchen is rarely the biggest line in a build, but it is one of the most reliable ways to slip your programme and rack up variations.
It comes down to five things: layout, access, services, scheduling and spec. Sort those early and the kitchen package goes quiet. Leave them and you are chasing callbacks well past your Code Compliance Certificate. The rest of this is how those five behave differently in a tower versus a terraced run, what moves the cost either way, where developers trip, and the questions worth asking before anyone cuts a sheet of board.
Layout: tight runs versus repeated plans
Apartment kitchens run tight. Galley or single-run, usually open to the living area, so the joinery is also the feature wall the buyer sees first. That puts the pressure on finish quality and on squeezing a recirculating rangehood, integrated appliances and sometimes a concealed laundry into a small footprint. The same plan repeats across dozens of identical units, so one tidy refinement pays you back the whole tower. One sloppy detail does the same in reverse. If the carcass return next to the fridge is 20mm out, you are not fixing it once, you are fixing it eighty times.
Townhouses give you room. Island or peninsula, a scullery once you get into mid-spec, more storage. The catch is variation. Most townhouse developments run two or three plans, often mirrored, so handing and cabinet schedules change unit to unit. Your problem is not space. It is holding one spec across the plan types so you are not quietly building three bespoke kitchens at volume effort. A mirrored plan sounds like the same kitchen flipped, but the moment the plumbing wall stays put and only the cabinetry flips, your sink base, your waste and your dishwasher position all move. That has to be drawn, not assumed. The same discipline that keeps a single home's layout choice working in a tight footprint is what holds a spec steady across two dozen units.
The open-plan trap in apartments
Because the apartment kitchen faces the lounge, every compromise is on show. There is nowhere to hide a meter box, a riser bulkhead or a clumsy filler panel. The good developers decide early whether appliances are integrated or freestanding, because that single call reshapes the whole elevation and the price. Integrated panels on the fridge and dishwasher lift the look and the cost; freestanding stainless reads more rental and saves you a panel per unit. Pick one and hold it. Mixing it across a floor for no reason is how a buyer ends up comparing two units and asking why theirs feels cheaper.
Access is where they split
This is the sharpest difference. In a multi-level building everything moves through one goods lift or hoist, usually on a booked slot you share with every other trade. An oversized pre-assembled island will not fit, so cabinets go up flat and get built in place. Protection on the lift car and the finished common areas is not optional, because the body corporate inherits any damage. We plan that into how the kitchen is packed before it leaves the bench in East Tamaki, so a run arrives labelled by unit and level and does not sit in a lobby blocking another trade.
Townhouses are ground-and-stair, unit by unit. Sounds easier, but it spreads the crew across a site instead of stacking them on one floor. A three-storey terrace puts the kitchen on level one more often than not, which means a real stair carry for benchtops and tall cabinets. We build in our own workshop, so we sequence and pack each run to suit the actual access rather than forcing one delivery method onto a site it does not fit. The deciding factor is rarely how big the kitchen is. It is the narrowest doorway and the tightest turn between the truck and the bench position. This is exactly where getting the dimensions right off a real site measure earns its keep against a plan measure that never saw the stair.
Measure the path, not just the room
Half the access problems we see would have been a five-minute fix at design stage. A 3.6 metre benchtop that has to come up an internal stair and round a landing either gets joined on site or does not go in at all. Stone tops are templated after the cabinets are set, so a benchtop join becomes a design decision, not a defect, as long as someone makes it on purpose. The cost of getting this wrong is not the material. It is a crew standing on site with a slab they cannot place, and a reschedule that pushes the next three units.
Services and consent: what the building lets you do
Apartments tighten the rules. Rangehoods usually recirculate instead of ducting outside, because punching a duct through a fire-rated floor or an acoustic separation is a problem you do not want. Fire-rated and acoustic separations limit what you can cut or penetrate. Plumbing and electrical risers decide where the sink and appliances can actually land. Body corporate rules and consent conditions can lock in appliance types and waste connections before you have drawn a thing. Townhouses sit closer to a standalone house: external venting is usually doable, and gas is more often on the table, though plenty of developers now run induction across the board to dodge the gas reticulation cost entirely.
None of it is a drama if it is coordinated up front. The dear version is finding a venting or riser clash after the cabinets are made. That is exactly the variation that supply-and-install under one contract is built to kill, because the same team that measures the riser is the team building the cabinet that has to clear it. Where it goes wrong is the split contract: a kitchen supplier who builds to a plan, an installer who finds the clash, and a developer wearing the variation in the middle with nobody owning it. The same coordination gap is what drives most variations and RFIs on a kitchen package, and most of it is preventable on paper.
Scheduling against the master programme
An apartment install sits hard on the critical path. A whole floor of units comes online in a short window once it is weathertight and lined, so the kitchen trade lands a big volume in a fixed slot and clears out for the next trade. Miss your window and you are not just late, you are out of sequence behind the painters and the flooring crew, waiting for a gap that might be a fortnight away. A townhouse programme stages, with units handed over in batches, so the same crew rolls block to block on a steady rhythm. We run 10-plus kitchens a week, so we can match either. The planning conversation is genuinely different for each, and that is the conversation worth having early.
Either way the kitchen cannot be the trade holding up handover. We give you a real manufacturing lead time with the quote, so the package slots into the master programme on numbers, not on hope. A single install run of five to seven days for a typical job means we are in and out cleanly rather than camped on your site bleeding your other trades' access. The number that actually matters to a developer is not the install day. It is the lead time from sign-off to first delivery, because that is what you build the rest of the programme around. If lead time is the lever you live or die by, it is worth understanding how kitchen lead times land against a construction programme before you commit a slot.
A worked example: a 24-unit Flat Bush townhouse run
Say you are building 24 terraced units in Flat Bush, three plan types, mirrored, handed over in three blocks of eight. Here is roughly how the kitchen package runs when it is planned properly rather than left to fall out of the build.
First, we lock the spec once, off your drawings and plan types. Three plans, mirrored, means six cabinet schedules, not twenty-four. Each hand gets its own drawn schedule, because the services do not flip with the cabinetry, and those six then repeat across the 24 units. We agree melteca carcasses, a matte 2-pac door, a 20mm engineered-stone benchtop across all 24 units, and induction throughout so there is no gas reticulation to coordinate. That decision alone takes a whole sub-trade off the programme. We quote it on a per-unit trade number, GST exclusive, so you can see what the stone is costing you against laminate before you commit to it for the whole run.
Then we sequence to the staging. Block one's eight kitchens are manufactured while block one is being lined, delivered labelled by unit, and installed in one run while we are templating block two's benchtops. Because we are running the same six schedules repeatedly, by block three the crew knows every cabinet before it comes off the truck. Callbacks drop to near nothing because the spec never changed and nobody improvised. The developer who tries to value-engineer one block mid-run, swapping the stone for laminate on block two to save a few dollars a metre, usually loses more than they save: now you are templating two benchtop types, holding two material orders, and explaining to a block-two buyer why their kitchen looks different to the showhome. Decide it once for all 24, or accept you are running two jobs. There is a right way to trim cost here, and it is value engineering without cheapening the build, decided up front rather than mid-run.
Spec by end use
What goes in should follow who lives there. A quick read on setting spec by product type:
| Unit type | Doors / carcass | Benchtop | Where the spend goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build-to-rent apartments | Melteca or matte 2-pac | Laminate or engineered stone | Durability, easy clean between tenancies |
| Owner-occupier apartments | Integrated, matte 2-pac, timber accents | Engineered stone | The open-plan feature kitchen the buyer sees first |
| Standard townhouses | Durable spec repeated cleanly | Laminate or engineered stone | Consistency across plan types; scullery as value lever |
| Premium townhouses | Soft-close throughout, timber | Stone island | A step-up buyers can actually see |
Consistency is the whole game. Volume work rewards a spec decided once and reproduced exactly, not re-argued unit by unit. The scullery is your best value lever on townhouses: it is where you add perceived value cheaply on the premium plans, and where you strip cost on the standard ones without the buyer feeling robbed, because the main kitchen still reads complete. Build-to-rent in particular rewards a tighter brief, and there is more on specifying kitchens for build-to-rent so they protect your yield when the tenant, not a buyer, is who you are building for.
Forty units, zero surprises.
What the kitchen actually costs, and what moves it
Nobody can give you a real per-unit number without the drawings, and anyone who fires one off the hip is guessing. What is honest is the levers, because those are what separate a sharp package from a bloated one. The biggest single mover is the benchtop. Laminate is the floor; engineered stone is a clear step up per metre; natural stone is another step again and brings template, slab selection and waste into the picture. Across forty units, the gap between laminate and stone is real money, so that is the first decision to cost properly, not the last. It is worth running the laminate versus stone numbers on cost against value before you default to either.
After the benchtop, the levers in rough order of impact: door finish (melteca is the floor, matte 2-pac lacquer costs more but reads premium and hides fingerprints, timber is dearer again); integrated versus freestanding appliances, where every integration panel is a per-unit add; soft-close hardware across all drawers and doors versus standard on the budget tiers; and the scullery, which on townhouses is a whole second small kitchen's worth of cabinetry if you let it grow. The quieter lever is repetition itself. The more identical units you run, the lower the per-unit number goes, because the workshop is reproducing a known thing rather than solving a new one each time. A messy schedule with forty near-identical-but-not-quite kitchens costs more to build than forty truly identical ones, every time. All trade pricing, no showroom markup, plus GST.
What goes wrong
The same handful of mistakes show up across most developer jobs, and none of them are about the kitchen being badly made. They are about coordination.
- Spec drift: changing the benchtop or door finish part-way through a run to save a few dollars, then running two material orders, two templates and two looks across one development
- Calling the kitchen in before the floor is weathertight and lined, so the crew arrives to a slab they cannot work on and the slot is burned
- Designing a benchtop or tall cabinet that physically cannot reach its position up an internal stair or through a goods lift, discovered on install day
- Leaving venting and riser positions un-coordinated, so a recirculating rangehood or a sink ends up clashing with something the cabinets were already built around
- Splitting supply and install across two contracts, so the clash that nobody owns becomes the developer's variation
- Forgetting the body corporate or consent conditions lock appliance types or waste connections before anyone has drawn the kitchen
Every one of these is cheaper to prevent at drawing stage than to fix on site. The fix on site is always a crew standing around, a reschedule, and a conversation about who pays for it.
The cheapest kitchen package I can give a developer is the one that lands on programme, comes out the same across every unit, and never brings me back for a callback or a variation.
What to ask before you commit a kitchen package
Whoever you use, these are the questions that separate a package that goes quiet from one that bites you on site. Ask them early, before sign-off, not after the first delivery.
- Is supply and install one contract and one invoice, or am I coordinating two trades and wearing the gap between them?
- What is the manufacturing lead time from sign-off to first delivery, and does that fit my master programme?
- Have you measured the actual access path, including the goods lift, internal stairs and the tightest doorway, not just the room?
- How are benchtop joins handled where a slab cannot reach its position in one piece?
- Are you Site Safe qualified and able to work to my site's health and safety requirements from day one?
- How do you label and sequence deliveries so a run does not sit blocking other trades?
- What is the per-unit trade price, plus GST, and exactly which finishes and appliances does it assume?
- How are recirculating rangehoods, risers and waste connections coordinated against the consent and any body corporate conditions?
Frequently asked questions
Can you supply just the kitchens and let our own builder install them?
We can, but for volume developer work we steer you toward supply and install under one contract, so the team measuring the access and the riser is the team building the cabinet that has to fit. Supply-only suits a one-off where your builder knows the site cold; across twenty or forty units, single accountability keeps the per-unit number honest and the callbacks low.
How far ahead do you need our drawings to hold a programme slot?
Send the drawings, plan types and access details as early as you have them and we will price it off those, but the number that drives your programme is the manufacturing lead time from sign-off, not the quote. The earlier the spec is locked, the earlier we can schedule manufacturing against your weathertight and lining dates.
Do recirculating rangehoods actually meet the Building Code in apartments?
Recirculating hoods are standard in apartments precisely because ducting through fire-rated and acoustic separations is restricted, and the building's consent will usually have already settled the ventilation approach. Confirm the ventilation strategy against your consent conditions before the cabinets are drawn, and the rangehood is a non-event.
We are doing build-to-rent. Does the spec really change versus units we are selling?
It should. Build-to-rent rewards hard-wearing, easy-to-clean finishes between tenancies: melteca or matte 2-pac doors, laminate or engineered-stone tops, hardware that takes a beating. Owner-occupier and premium units earn the stone island and integrated appliances because those sell the unit; match the spend to who lives there.
How do you keep the kitchen identical across dozens of units?
We lock one spec off your plan types, build the same handful of cabinet schedules repeatedly in our East Tamaki workshop, and deliver labelled by unit so nobody improvises on site. The spec never changing is what drops callbacks to near nothing across a run.
Send us your numbers
Twenty-three years in, more than 2,000 kitchens installed across Auckland, including as head-contractor kitchen supplier to Spencer Henshaw. We plan apartment and townhouse packages as the different jobs they are. Supply and install sit under one contract and one invoice, so layout, access, services, scheduling and spec are run by the same team instead of falling between trades. Trade pricing with no showroom markup keeps the per-unit number honest, and we are Site Safe qualified, so we are working safely on your site from the first day.
Send us your unit count and a brief: plans, plan types, access details, and where you sit in the programme. We will come back inside 24 hours with bulk pricing and a realistic install schedule. One tower of compact apartments or a staged run of townhouses out in Papakura, we will spec it to the end use and get it in on programme.