Quick answer
A made-to-measure vanity starts around $1,800 including GST for a 900mm unit, and the decisions that actually matter are depth, whether it hangs on the wall or sits on the floor, and where your waste pipe comes through. That last one is not a detail — it decides whether you can have drawers at all, and it is the thing most people find out about after they have chosen.
Key points
- From about $1,800 including GST for 900mm. Width, finish, a mirror cabinet and soft-close move it from there.
- 450mm deep is standard; 400mm buys back a walkway in a tight Auckland bathroom and barely costs you anything usable.
- Wall-hung makes a small bathroom look bigger and makes the floor easy to clean. It needs blocking in the wall, so decide before the linings go on.
- Drawers are better than doors, but the trap has to be routed around. Get the plumbing position before the cabinet is drawn.
- What fails is the bottom of a floor-standing unit, at the toe kick, from water that never dried.
Bathrooms are the smallest rooms in the house and they get designed last, usually around whatever the old vanity was. Which is how a family of four ends up with a 600mm unit and a single drawer that does not close because the trap is in the way.
A vanity is a simple cabinet. The complications are all around it: a wet floor, a waste pipe in a fixed position, a wall that may or may not have anything solid to fix to, and about a metre of space to fit a family's worth of storage into.
Depth is the decision that changes the room
450mm is the standard vanity depth and it suits most bathrooms. In a tight one — a townhouse ensuite, a 1970s bathroom that was never generous — dropping to 400mm gives you back 50mm of walkway, which does not sound like anything until you are edging past the door swing. You lose very little: a 400mm cabinet still takes a standard basin and still holds what people actually keep in a vanity.
Going the other way, anything over 500mm starts to feel like it is in the room with you, and it does not give you proportionally more storage because the back of a deep vanity is where things go to be forgotten. Width is where you should spend, not depth.
| Dimension | Typical | When to change it |
|---|---|---|
| Depth | 450mm | 400mm in a tight room. Over 500mm rarely earns its space |
| Height | 850mm | Lower for a family with small children, higher if everyone is tall — it is a cabinet, not a standard |
| Width | 900mm | From 450mm for a powder room up to 1500mm for a double. Width is where storage actually comes from |
| Toe kick | Recessed, or none at all | Wall-hung removes it entirely, which is the single best thing you can do for longevity |
Wall-hung or floor-standing
Wall-hung wins on almost everything except cost and fitting. You see floor under the cabinet, so a small bathroom reads bigger. You can mop straight under it. And critically, there is no toe kick sitting in the puddle that forms every time somebody gets out of the shower.
The catch is that it has to hang off something. A vanity full of water and ceramic is heavy, and it needs solid blocking behind the lining — which means deciding while the wall is open. Retrofitting blocking into a finished bathroom means cutting the lining, and at that point the cost difference has gone.
Why the waste pipe decides your drawers
A basin drains into a trap, and the trap sits in the middle of the cabinet at roughly the height a top drawer wants to be. With doors it does not matter — you open them and the pipework is just there. With drawers, the drawer box has to be cut around the trap, which is normal work and looks fine, but it has to be designed in. A drawer box built as a plain rectangle will hit the pipe and stop 200mm out.
So the sequence is: find out where the waste comes through the wall or the floor, then draw the cabinet. If the bathroom is existing, that is a five-minute look under the old vanity. If it is a new build, it is a question for the plumber before the slab or the lining, and it is worth asking because a waste that comes through 100mm to one side can be the difference between two usable drawers and none.
Drawers are worth the trouble. A vanity cupboard is a cave with a pipe in it, and everything at the back of it is lost. Two drawers hold the same things where you can see them.
What actually fails
Bathroom cabinets do not usually fail at the hinge or the runner. They fail at the bottom edge of a floor-standing carcass, where water sits against a cut edge of board and nobody ever wipes it because it is behind the door line. The board wicks it up, swells, and the door stops sitting flush. By the time you notice, the fix is a new cabinet.
- Wall-hung removes the problem entirely — there is nothing at floor level to sit in water.
- If it must be floor-standing, a recessed toe kick keeps the carcass edge back out of the splash zone.
- Sealed edges matter more here than in a kitchen. Ask what the exposed bottom edges are finished with.
- Soft-close is not a luxury in a bathroom. A slammed door in a small tiled room is loud at 6am and it loosens the fixings over a couple of years.
- Extraction is not cabinetry, but it is the reason one bathroom's vanity lasts fifteen years and the identical one down the road lasts six.
Frequently asked questions
How much is a custom bathroom vanity in Auckland?
From around $1,800 including GST for a 900mm unit made to your opening. Width is the main driver from there, with finish, a mirror cabinet above and soft-close drawers as separate lines rather than a package. A 1500mm double vanity with drawers is a different job from a 600mm powder room unit, and the honest way to price either is off the actual space.
Can I have drawers instead of a cupboard?
Almost always, but the drawer boxes have to be built around the waste trap, so we need to know where it comes through before the cabinet is drawn. Look under the existing vanity and take a photo — that is genuinely enough. In a new build, ask the plumber to confirm the waste position before the lining goes on, because moving it later is a wall repair.
Is wall-hung worth it?
In a small bathroom, yes, on two counts: the room looks bigger with floor visible under the cabinet, and you have removed the place where these units die. It needs solid blocking in the wall, which is trivial while the wall is open and awkward once it is closed. Decide before the linings.
What depth should a vanity be?
450mm as standard. Drop to 400mm if the walkway is tight — you barely lose usable storage and you get 50mm back where you actually feel it. Going deeper than 500mm mostly buys you space at the back of a cupboard that nobody reaches into.
Do you make the vanity and the laundry at the same time?
Yes, and it is usually the cheaper way to do it. It is the same board, the same edging and the same hardware, so the setup and the delivery are being paid for once instead of twice. The same goes for a wardrobe or a kitchen ordered in the same run.
In short
Find the waste pipe first, hang it on the wall if you possibly can, and spend your money on width rather than depth. Everything else about a vanity is preference, and preference is cheap to change on a drawing and expensive to change afterwards.