Quick answer
The five main kitchen layouts are straight (single-wall), L-shape, U-shape, galley (two parallel runs) and island. For Auckland volume townhouse and apartment builds, straight and galley layouts suit narrow footprints, while L-shape and island work better in open-plan living. MTN Kitchens supplies and installs all five at trade pricing.
Pick the layout first. Everything after it follows: cabinet counts, benchtop runs, where the rangehood and hob land, the plumbing and electrical rough-in, and how many dwellings you can squeeze onto a floor plate. On a single home a wrong call costs you a variation or two. On a 40-unit terraced development in Flat Bush, the same wrong call gets repeated 40 times, and the small inefficiencies stack into real money and real callbacks.
Four wall layouts; the island bolts on.
Key points
- Choose the layout before anything else, it drives cabinet counts, services rough-in and how many dwellings fit on the plate.
- Straight runs suit studios and one-beds, L-shapes are the townhouse all-rounder, U-shapes and islands need floor area to earn their keep.
- On volume work the real saving is settling one spec and repeating it, not shaving a corner cabinet.
- Watch the four things that bite on site: rangehood venting, island in-slab services, blind corners and benchtops measured off drawings.
- MTN supplies and installs on one contract at trade pricing from the East Tamaki workshop, with a layout recommendation back to you within 24 hours.
There's no best layout in the abstract. There's the right one for the footprint, the budget and whoever ends up living there. Here are the five we supply most across Auckland, what each is good at, where each bites you, and the build types they suit. The point is to help you brief faster and lock a spec you can run across a whole subdivision without arguing it out for every unit.
Straight run: the apartment workhorse
Everything sits along one wall. It's the tightest-fitting layout going, which is why it turns up in studios, one-bedroom apartments and minor dwellings all over the isthmus. No return corner means no blind corner cabinets to engineer, fewer cuts on the saw, and the simplest plumbing and electrical run you'll get. Repeat that across a block and the per-unit cost drops noticeably.
You pay for it in benchtop and storage. Prep, cook and clean all fight for the same line, so the zones blur. For compact rental stock that's a fair trade, and it standardises beautifully. Every joiner and plumber on site works to one drawing, which is exactly what you want when the units are identical. If you're squeezing a kitchen into a genuinely tight footprint, the tricks in designing a small kitchen that feels bigger are worth running over the drawing before you lock it.
One thing people get wrong on a straight run is the rangehood. In a single-line kitchen the hob usually sits mid-run, and if you've gone open-plan with a recirculating hood to dodge an external duct, the cooking smells live in the lounge. On a one-bed that's a real liveability issue, not a detail. Either commit to a ducted run to an outside wall at design stage or be honest that the recirc unit is a compromise. Don't discover it on the first PCI walk-through with the buyer standing there.
L-shape: the all-rounder
Two adjoining walls. It's the most adaptable layout we make. You get a proper work triangle, it sits well in open-plan living, and there's usually room for a small table or a couple of stools. For the two- and three-bedroom townhouses and terraced housing going up around Mount Wellington, Hobsonville Point and Papakura, the L-shape is the sweet spot between a kitchen people actually want and floor area you can sell. If you're weighing apartment versus townhouse stock on the same site, what changes between apartment and townhouse kitchens is worth a read alongside this.
Watch the corner. A blind corner is dead space unless you spec the right hardware, and good corner gear costs. Across 40 units that one line item either vanishes into the spec or quietly inflates every kitchen. Settle it at design stage, price it once, and carry the same costed answer through the programme.
The corner question, settled
You've got three honest options for an L-shape corner, and the right one depends on how much you're willing to spend per unit. A plain blind corner cabinet is cheapest, but the back third is a cave you can't reach without a torch. A corner carousel or lazy susan recovers most of it for a moderate hardware spend. A proper pull-out corner mechanism gets you nearly everything but adds real cost per kitchen. On a developer job we'll usually steer you to the carousel as the value pick, then write it into the spec so it's the same across every dwelling and there's nothing to decide on unit 23.
| Option | Relative cost per unit | What you recover |
|---|---|---|
| Blind corner cabinet | Cheapest | Back third unreachable, a torch-only cave |
| Carousel / lazy susan | Moderate | Most of the corner, the usual value pick at volume |
| Pull-out corner mechanism | Dearest | Nearly everything, adds real cost across 40 units |
U-shape and galley
A U-shape wraps three walls. Maximum storage, maximum bench, clean zone separation. It earns its keep in larger homes and premium units where the kitchen is part of the sell. The cost is floor area and two corners to resolve, so it rarely stacks up in tight plans or high-density blocks where every square metre is on the price list.
A galley is two parallel benches with a corridor down the middle. For cooking it's genuinely quick, everything a half-turn away, which is why it suits compact apartments and anywhere flow beats seating. Hold the corridor between 900mm and 1200mm. At the 900mm end, offset the dishwasher from the oven so the two open doors don't meet; wider and you've thrown away the efficiency. No corners either, which is a quiet win for cost and consistency at volume. For the dimensions that repeat cleanly across a site, standard kitchen sizes and layouts for NZ townhouses sets out the numbers we work to.
The galley has one subtlety that bites at volume: who shares the corridor. If the run is a through-route to a back door or laundry, two people and a dishwasher door turn it into a bottleneck. In a townhouse where the scullery or laundry sits off the kitchen, plan the traffic before you plan the cabinets. We've seen galleys spec'd beautifully on paper that nobody can cook in because the whole household walks through them to get to the washing line.
Island: the one buyers ask for
An island bolts a freestanding bench onto any of the above, and it's the layout people request by name at the open home. Social hub, extra prep, extra storage, an obvious centrepiece in open-plan living. On standalone homes and the dearer townhouses it lifts perceived value off the listing photos alone. But it's hungry: you want roughly a metre clear on every side. Put a sink or hob in it and you're committing to services in the slab, which has to be coordinated with the builder early or it becomes an expensive afterthought.
The slab call is the one that catches people. Plumbing and power for an island go in before the concrete pour, so the island's position is locked the day the slab cures, not the day we measure. If the developer hasn't decided whether the island is a feature plinth or a working bench with a sink, the in-slab services either aren't there or are in the wrong spot, and now you're chasing a chase through finished concrete. Decide the island's job at consent stage. A waterfall stone end and a working sink are two very different briefs.
Quick way to match layout to build:
- Studio or one-bed: straight run, with the rangehood duct drawn out to a wall before lock-up
- Townhouse or terrace: L-shape, with the corner hardware picked and priced once
- Premium or larger home: U-shape, when the floor area allows
- Compact unit built for flow: galley, corridor held between 900mm and 1200mm
- Standalone or feature home: island, needs space and early services
Where the scullery changes the game
Across the better townhouse and standalone stock in Auckland, the scullery has quietly become the thing buyers notice. It lets you run a clean, almost showroom kitchen out front, an island and a tidy bench, while the toaster, the microwave, the second sink and the mess live behind a wall. For a developer that's a strong selling line for not much extra joinery, because a scullery is mostly basic melteca cabinets and open shelving, not the front-of-house finish.
The trap is space. A scullery only works if it's a genuine walk-in with a metre of clearance and a real bench, not a cupboard with a door. If the floor plan can't give it 1.4 to 1.8 metres of width, you're better off being honest and putting that area back into the main kitchen. Half a scullery satisfies nobody, and it shows up in the photos. When we design these we'll tell you straight whether the footprint earns one or whether you're better keeping the storage in a tall bank of cabinetry.
A worked example: 24 townhouses in Flat Bush
Say it's a 24-unit terraced development off Murphys Road, a mix of two- and three-bed dwellings on a single resource consent, builder wants kitchens flowing as each block hits lock-up. Here's roughly how the layout decision plays out and where the money sits.
First call is one base layout for the lot. The two-beds are tight, so an L-shape with a single corner is the obvious workhorse; the three-beds have the width for an L-shape plus a small island or a short scullery as the upsell unit. We resist the urge to draw four different kitchens. Two configurations, drawn dead right once, beat 24 bespoke ones every time, because the joiner, the plumber and the stone measurer all work to the same two sheets.
The sequence
Lock the layout and finishes at design stage, before consent drawings are final, so the plumbing and electrical rough-in is correct on the first try. Carcasses and doors get manufactured in the East Tamaki workshop in batches that match the build programme, so block A's kitchens aren't sitting on site collecting dust while block C is still framing. We measure benchtops off the installed cabinets, not off the drawings, then template, fabricate and fit. Each kitchen goes in as a single 5 to 7 day install: cabinets, benchtop, splashback, sink and connections, one crew, one hand-over.
Where the levers are
Benchtop is the biggest single lever on this job. Laminate keeps the two-beds keen on cost; stepping the three-bed islands up to engineered stone adds real money per unit but reads as a premium kitchen in the listing. Door finish is the second lever: melteca on the two-beds, a 2-pac lacquer front on the feature units if the price point supports it. Corner hardware, handle choice and soft-close are smaller levers but they multiply by 24, so we cost them once and hold the number. The savings here aren't clever, they're just discipline: one spec, batched manufacture, one install crew, no variations chasing the programme.
Honest cost guidance and the levers that move it
Anyone quoting you a firm per-kitchen number before seeing a plan is guessing. What I can give you is where installed kitchens actually land, plus GST: a small galley $6,500 to $9,500, a standard straight run $8,000 to $12,000, an L-shape $12,000 to $18,000, a big U-shape or island $17,000 to $25,000, and $25,000 to $45,000 once there's a scullery behind it. Supply and install on one contract. Where you sit inside those bands is the levers below, biggest first.
On 40 units, the layout call compounds.
- Benchtop material: the single biggest mover. Laminate is the budget floor, engineered stone is the volume favourite, natural stone is dearer again and varies slab to slab.
- Door and panel finish: melamine or melteca is the workhorse; timber and 2-pac lacquer sit well above it and need more lead time.
- Layout and cabinet count: more cabinets and more corners cost more, full stop. A straight run is cheaper to repeat than a U-shape, every time.
- Hardware: soft-close, corner mechanisms and pull-outs are small per unit but multiply hard across a development.
- Services coordination: islands with in-slab plumbing and power, and any move from recirculating to ducted rangehoods, add cost that has nothing to do with the joinery.
- Volume itself: repeated identical units carry far less per kitchen than one-offs, because manufacture batches and the install crew never relearns the job.
Every variation mid-programme costs you twice, once in the change and once in the disruption to a crew that had the rhythm. Trade pricing with no showroom markup helps, but discipline on the spec helps more. If you want the benchtop call in detail, laminate vs stone benchtops on cost versus value walks the trade-off through.
What goes wrong on site
Most kitchen pain on Auckland builds isn't the kitchen. It's coordination that should have happened earlier. The classics, in rough order of how often I see them: services roughed in to the wrong spec because the layout changed after the plumber had already been; a rangehood duct that nobody planned a path for, so it ends up recirculating against the brief; an island position that doesn't match the in-slab services because the call got made late.
Then there's the measure-off-drawings mistake. Benchtops measured off the plans instead of the installed cabinets, and now the stone doesn't fit the as-built walls, which are never perfectly square in a fast terraced build. We template off the real cabinets for exactly this reason. Another recurring one is appliance clearances: someone specs a 900mm freestanding cooker into an 850mm gap, or a dishwasher door that fouls the oven door across a 900mm galley. These are cheap to catch on a drawing and expensive to fix in melamine.
The last one is programme drift. Kitchens delivered to site too early sit in a half-built dwelling getting knocked and dusted, or delivered too late and now they're the thing holding up the CCC. Batching manufacture to the build sequence, not to one big drop, is the fix, and it only works if the kitchen supplier is talking to the builder's programme rather than their own.
Consents, compliance and the boring stuff that stops you
A kitchen swap in an existing dwelling usually doesn't need a building consent on its own, but the moment you move plumbing or alter structure you're into Council territory, and on a new build the kitchen is part of the wider consent anyway. The detail that catches people is the Code Compliance Certificate. The CCC won't issue until the as-builts are signed off, and a rangehood ducted incorrectly, or a sink waste that doesn't match the consented plumbing, can hold it up. Get the kitchen's services right against the consent the first time and it's a non-event.
If the project is rental stock, the Healthy Homes Standards touch the kitchen mainly through ventilation: an extraction fan or rangehood vented to outdoors is the safe read for any new kitchen in a rental. On unit-title and cross-lease developments, watch where the kitchen services cross into common property, because that changes who signs off what. None of this is hard, but it's the kind of thing that quietly stalls a hand-over if it's left to the end. A Site Safe qualified crew and an LBP on the build side keep the compliance side clean.
Decide once, then repeat it
On volume work the saving isn't really in the layout. It's in settling it once and building it the same way every time. Lock the configuration, the corner hardware, the benchtop and the finishes up front, and every kitchen comes off one drawing. Your trades know what's landing on site before the truck arrives, and the variations and callbacks that eat a programme dry up. That repeatability is what keeps a kitchen package on time across a development, and it's how we hold capacity for ten-plus kitchens a week out of the East Tamaki workshop.
On a 40-unit job I'd rather spend a day getting the first kitchen dead right than chase 40 small fixes later. Design it once, build it forty times, no surprises on site.
Seeing it helps more than a spreadsheet. Our 3D designer drops a layout onto the actual footprint before anything's cut, so you can put an L-shape and a galley on the same plan and read the storage and clearance trade-offs in real terms. From our own workshop in East Tamaki we supply and install on one contract and one invoice, at trade pricing with no showroom markup, the same way we run head-contractor kitchen supply for the likes of Spencer Henshaw.
What to ask before you lock a layout
Whether you brief us or anyone else, run the spec through these before it's final. They're the questions that decide whether the kitchen goes in clean or fights you on site:
- Is one base layout enough for the whole development, with one or two upsell variants, rather than a bespoke kitchen per unit?
- Where does the rangehood vent, and is the duct path actually drawn before lock-up?
- If there's an island, is its position and its in-slab plumbing and power locked before the pour?
- Has the corner hardware been chosen and priced once, then carried across every unit?
- Are appliance clearances checked against the real appliances, not generic gaps?
- Is the benchtop being templated off installed cabinets, not off the drawings?
- Does the manufacture and delivery schedule match the build programme block by block?
- Do the kitchen services match the consent, so nothing holds up the CCC?
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Can we mix layouts across one development?
Yes, and on a mixed two- and three-bed site you usually should. The discipline isn't one layout for everything, it's a small, deliberate set: typically one workhorse layout for the standard units and one upsell variant for the feature dwellings, so two configurations drawn properly run far cleaner than a dozen near-identical ones.
Is an island worth it on a townhouse?
It depends on the floor area and the price point. An island wants about a metre clear all the way round, which a lot of townhouse plans don't have, but on a three-bed with the width it's one of the strongest things in the listing photos. If the space is marginal, a peninsula off an L-shape gives you most of the social benefit without the metre-all-round demand.
Laminate or stone benchtops for a rental development?
For rental stock you're holding, laminate is the sensible default: durable enough, easily replaced and the cheapest lever per unit. Where the units are for sale, engineered stone on the visible benches earns its cost back in how the kitchen reads, and a common middle path is laminate on standard units and stone on the feature dwellings, costed as two clear lines.
How long does a single kitchen take to install?
On a typical townhouse or apartment we run a single install over 5 to 7 days: cabinets in, benchtop templated and fitted, splashback, sink and connections, then hand-over. That assumes the dwelling is ready with services roughed in to spec and walls lined and stopped, which is why we work to the builder's programme rather than a fixed date.
Do we get one invoice or separate supply and install?
One contract, one invoice. We manufacture in our own East Tamaki workshop and install with our own Site Safe qualified crews, so the kitchen is a single line of accountability rather than a supplier and a separate fixing contractor pointing at each other when something doesn't fit.
Send us the brief
If you've got a development coming up, the fastest way to get a real answer is to send us what you've got: the unit count, the floor plans or consent drawings, or even just a rough brief and a target price point. We'll come back with a layout recommendation and bulk trade pricing within 24 hours, no showroom markup, supply and install on one contract. Over 23 years and 2,000-plus kitchens across Auckland, the jobs that run cleanest are the ones where we got the first kitchen right before the rest were ever cut. Send the numbers and let's get yours dead right once.