Quick answer
In most Parnell and Newmarket apartments the building has already decided. The facade is common property, and the Unit Titles Act's definition of building elements reaches cladding systems and the exterior aesthetics of the building — so a new vent alters something the body corporate is legally required to maintain, and it needs their written consent. On plenty of these blocks you won't get it. No hole means no duct, and no duct means a recirculating rangehood, which settles the rest: induction rather than gas, because a flame adds combustion products and water vapour to a room you can't vent, and a carbon filter is built for neither. The filter becomes a regime instead of a fitting — Fisher & Paykel calls its charcoal filters disposable and suggests changing them about every two months. And concrete hides nothing, so every service you keep runs in a bulkhead you drew on purpose, or one you found on install day.
Key points
- The external wall of an apartment is almost always common property rather than part of your unit, and the Unit Titles Act's definition of building elements expressly reaches cladding systems and the exterior aesthetics of the building — so the vent is the body corporate's call, not yours.
- The Act makes you notify the body corporate of any additions or structural alterations before work starts, with no materiality test on the notice itself; written consent is a second hurdle that arrives once the work materially affects another unit or the common property.
- G4/AS1, the Acceptable Solution for ventilation, wants a space containing a cooktop to have a mechanical extract fan of no less than 50 L/s exhausting to the outside, and states plainly that natural ventilation on its own is not adequate for cooktop moisture — a recirculating hood is not that.
- A recirculating rangehood does not satisfy the Healthy Homes ventilation standard at all, though a landlord who doesn't own the whole building may be partially exempt where complying would need work in a part of the building they are not the sole owner of.
- Concrete has no wall cavity and no ceiling void, so every pipe, cable and duct you can't delete ends up in a bulkhead — the only real question is whether you drew it or inherited it.
Can't cut the facade? The building picks your cooktop.
Stand on Parnell Rise and look up. Half the buildings on that slope, and most of the ones tucked in behind St Georges Bay Road, are concrete: poured in the seventies, re-clad somewhere in the noughties, and full of kitchens that have been apologised for at every open home since. Same story over the hill in Newmarket, in the walk-ups off Khyber Pass and the towers around Nuffield Street and Kingdon Street. Tight layouts. Low ceilings. Walls that ring solid when you knock them. And a rangehood that has been handing the same air back to the room for thirty years.
Owners in these buildings turn up at a kitchen supplier with a layout and leave with a lecture about the body corporate. Wrong order. The constraint that actually shapes the job is duller and sits further upstream: whether anything new is allowed through the outside wall. Answer that first and the rest mostly makes itself — hood, cooktop, filters, bulkheads, even where the fridge lands. What follows is that chain, in order. It isn't legal advice and it's no substitute for your own unit plan, your own body corporate rules, or a word with the council and an LBP before you order anything. Yours is the building that matters.
The wall is not yours
Pull the unit plan before you pull anything else. A unit title development is land subdivided into units and common property, and the Act defines common property as everything in the development not contained in a principal, accessory or future development unit. LINZ makes the same point from the surveyor's side: the remainder not comprised in any unit is common property. On most apartment plans the boundary is drawn at or near the inside face of the perimeter. The wall you want to cut through isn't part of what you bought.
It gets more pointed. The Act's definition of building elements covers the components necessary to the structural integrity of the building, the exterior aesthetics of the building, or the health and safety of the people who occupy it — and then names cladding systems specifically. The body corporate must maintain, repair or renew all building elements that relate to or serve more than one unit. So your duct is a hole through a thing the body corporate is on the hook for, terminating in a cowl bolted to the exterior aesthetics they're also on the hook for. When they say no, they're not being precious. They're the only party with a statutory duty attached to that wall.
Two obligations sit on you here and people routinely collapse them into one. The first is notice: you must notify the body corporate of an intention to carry out any additions or structural alterations before work starts. Any. There's no materiality filter on the notice. The filter sits on the second obligation — you must not make additions or structural alterations that materially affect another unit or the common property without the body corporate's written consent. Inside your own boundary, affecting nobody, you have a right. Through the facade you have a request. How that request gets processed is its own subject, and the rules that bite in an Auckland apartment vary enough building to building that reading yours isn't optional.
What the Building Code actually asks for
This is where the internet gets it wrong in both directions at once. One camp tells you a recirculating rangehood is illegal in New Zealand. The other tells you it's fine because everybody has one. Neither is true, and the accurate version is more useful than either.
G4/AS1 is the Acceptable Solution for Building Code clause G4 Ventilation, and the fifth edition came into effect on 28 July 2025. It's direct about cooktops. Spaces in household units and accommodation units that contain cooktops must have mechanical extract fans installed to remove the moisture those fixtures generate, and the fans — associated ducting included — must have a flowrate of no less than 50 L/s. Where intermittent mechanical extract is doing that job, it must exhaust the air to the outside at no less than 50 L/s. And in case anyone hoped an openable window would carry the load, the document says in its own comment that within this acceptable solution, natural ventilation on its own is not adequate to remove moisture generated from cooktops, showers and baths.
So a recirculating hood doesn't meet the Acceptable Solution. Say that plainly, because most suppliers won't. What it isn't is a ban. An Acceptable Solution is one deemed-to-comply route, not the only one — the Act allows an alternative solution, which means a design somebody has to author and a council that has to accept it. That's a cost and a programme, not a form you tick. And it only becomes your problem if your work engages the question at all.
Usually it doesn't. A straight swap — same space, same fixture count, sink where it was — generally sits inside the Schedule 1 exemption for alteration to existing sanitary plumbing, provided the total number of sanitary fixtures isn't increased, the alteration doesn't modify or affect any specified system, and an authorised person does the plumbing. MBIE's own worked example for that exemption is a homeowner proposing to remodel an existing kitchen within the same space, leaving the kitchen sink in the same position. That's a fair description of most apartment kitchens.
Read the specified system condition again though, because in an apartment it has teeth it doesn't have in a house on a section. Apartment buildings commonly carry a compliance schedule and an annual building warrant of fitness, and mechanical ventilation or air conditioning is specified system 9. If your block runs a shared extract riser — plenty of the nineties and two-thousands stock around Broadway and Carlton Gore Road does — then ventilation isn't a fitting in your kitchen. It's a system on the building's schedule. Cutting into it, capping it, or hanging a bigger fan off it isn't an alteration to your kitchen; it's an alteration to a specified system, and the exemption you were relying on has quietly evaporated.
And if you do apply for a consent, the thing everyone fears doesn't happen. Section 112 of the Building Act governs alterations to an existing building: the building as a whole must continue to comply with the Building Code to at least the same extent as before the alteration, and comply as nearly as is reasonably practicable with the fire and accessibility clauses. If your apartment never had ducted extraction, section 112 doesn't require you to invent it. It requires you not to make things worse. That's a far lower bar than the rumour, and it's most of the reason this question so rarely comes to a head.
| The question | What applies | What it means on your job |
|---|---|---|
| Does the Acceptable Solution allow a recirculating hood? | G4/AS1: a space with a cooktop needs mechanical extract of no less than 50 L/s, exhausting to the outside | No. And natural ventilation on its own is expressly not adequate, so an openable window doesn't rescue it |
| Is the Acceptable Solution the only way to comply? | No — it is one deemed-to-comply route; the Act permits an alternative solution | Possible, but somebody must design it and the council must accept it. Budget time, not a form |
| Do I need a consent for a like-for-like swap? | Schedule 1 exemption for alteration to existing sanitary plumbing — fixture count unchanged, no specified system affected, authorised person does the work | Usually no consent. MBIE's own example is remodelling a kitchen in the same space with the sink left where it is |
| Does my building have specified systems? | Apartment buildings commonly hold a compliance schedule and annual BWoF; mechanical ventilation or air conditioning is specified system 9 | If there's a shared extract riser, touching it can affect the BWoF and the exemption falls over |
| Ducting through a wall between units? | G4/AS1 notes extract systems passing through fire-rated building elements must maintain the fire performance of the building | Straight out of the simple exemptions and into fire design. Confirm with the council before you specify it |
| If I do apply for consent, must I add a duct? | Section 112 — the building must continue to comply at least to the same extent as before the alteration | You aren't required to improve what was never there. You aren't allowed to make it worse |
| Is it a rental? | Healthy Homes ventilation standard — a different instrument entirely | Different question, harder answer. See below |
Why the duct picks the cooktop
Here's the chain. If the air is going back into the room, the only question that matters is what you're asking the filter to catch.
A carbon filter is built for grease and odour. Fisher & Paykel describes its own charcoal filter as designed to remove grease and odours from cooking vapours before the cleansed air re-enters the kitchen in recirculating mode. That's the job, and the filters do it reasonably well for a while. What a carbon filter isn't built for is the by-product of burning something. A gas flame doesn't only heat the pan — it's a combustion process running in your kitchen, and combustion makes water vapour along with everything else it makes. In a room you can vent, manageable. In a sealed concrete box with a hood that hands the air straight back, you've added a source and removed the exit.
Which is why the answer is induction, and why it isn't really a preference. Induction puts its energy into the pan instead of the room, there's no flame and no combustion, and the only thing your filter deals with is what comes off the food. Be honest about what that achieves: you haven't solved ventilation. You've halved the problem, and it's the half you can actually control. The steam off a pot of pasta is the same either way.
There's a sharper version for the studios and one-bedders, which Newmarket has in quantity. G4/AS1 says domestic gas cookers in non room-sealed spaces that are also used for sleeping require permanent venting to the outside, sized to the gas input and subject to specific design. A studio off Khyber Pass where the bed and the hob share a room is exactly that space. Gas there isn't a taste question, and a recirculating hood isn't an answer to it.
| Option | What the filter is left to deal with | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Induction | Grease and steam off the food. Nothing else | The default here. No flame, so nothing is burning in a room you can't vent |
| Ceramic or radiant electric | Grease and steam, plus more waste heat pushed into the room | Works. Cheaper to buy, slower to cook on, hotter to live with in a sealed kitchen |
| Gas | Grease and steam, plus the products of combustion and the water vapour the flame itself makes | The combination to avoid. And in a studio, G4/AS1 wants permanent venting to the outside anyway |
| Leave the existing cooktop | Whatever it already deals with | Fine — until you apply for a consent or rent it out, when the question gets asked properly |
The filter is a regime, not a fitting
Ducted, a rangehood is a fan and a hole. Recirculating, it's a consumable, and somebody has to keep buying it. Fisher & Paykel is refreshingly blunt: the charcoal filter is a disposable item, replaced about every two months depending on use. Other manufacturers quote longer — three to six months turns up across the market — but the unit is months, not years, and all of them say it depends how you cook.
That matters more than it sounds. A saturated carbon filter doesn't fail loudly; it just stops working, and the first sign is that the kitchen still smells like last night's dinner. A filter loaded with grease is also a restriction to airflow, so the expensive hood you specced now moves less air than the tired one you replaced. Meanwhile the metal grease filters underneath are a separate item on a separate schedule and they go in the dishwasher, which is the bit people actually remember. Design the kitchen so the carbon cartridge is reachable without a ladder and a screwdriver, or it won't get changed. That's not cynicism. That's twenty-three years of callbacks.
Concrete means bulkheads. Draw them.
A timber house forgives you. There's a cavity to bury a waste in, a ceiling void to run a duct through, and a builder who'll make a problem vanish between two gib sheets while you're at work. Concrete forgives nothing. No cavity. No void. The slab over your head is the floor of the apartment above, and the wall behind your sink is quite possibly holding it up.
So the services go somewhere visible, and somewhere visible is a bulkhead. This is where apartment kitchens are won and lost. A bulkhead that was designed — full depth, running the length of the run, aligned with the cabinetry below, sized to take the hood's discharge and the under-cabinet lighting and the odd cable tray — reads as architecture. A bulkhead discovered on day three and boxed around a pipe nobody scanned for reads as a mistake with a downlight in it. Same material, same money, completely different drawing.
Before anyone drills, the concrete gets scanned, and the engineer — not the electrician, not the joiner — decides what may be cut. Post-tensioned floor slabs turn up often enough in Auckland's apartment stock that you treat every slab as though it has tendons until somebody with the drawings says otherwise, because the consequence of guessing isn't a repair. Chasing a structural wall for a power point is the same conversation with a smaller hole. Which is why measuring the space rather than trusting the drawings isn't optional here: the plans are fifty years old, the last three owners each moved something, and nothing is where the paper says.
The bulkhead then decides the layout, not the other way around. Once you know where the services must run, the cabinetry falls into place beneath them, and the moves that make a small apartment kitchen work — drawer banks instead of cupboards, a shallower run on the entry side, tall storage stacked at one end — are decisions you make with the bulkhead already on the page. Note too that G4/AS1's natural ventilation route for household units with only one external wall assumes the distance between that wall and the opposing wall is under 6 metres. Plenty of single-aspect apartments are deeper. The building keeps making your decisions for you.
In concrete, the bulkhead is the only place left.
Every apartment job, someone asks why we're drawing a bulkhead before we've drawn a cabinet. Because the bulkhead isn't negotiable and the cabinet is. Get that backwards and you're boxing something in on a Thursday with the owner watching you do it.
If you rent it out, the answer changes
Everything above is Building Code. The Healthy Homes ventilation standard is a different instrument with a different answer, and it's far less forgiving. For that standard a kitchen means a room with an indoor cooktop, and it requires an extractor fan that ventilates extracted air to outdoors. Recirculating extractor fans, and fans that don't ventilate to the outdoors, are not suitable for meeting it. Not weaker. Not borderline. Not suitable.
The numbers are specific. A kitchen fan installed from 1 July 2019 needs the fan and all exhaust ducting to have a diameter of at least 150mm, or an exhaust capacity of at least 50 litres per second, and it must vent outdoors. A fan installed before 1 July 2019 carries no minimum size or performance requirement but must be in good working order and vent outdoors — and when it stops working it has to be replaced with one meeting the current requirement within a reasonable time. That last clause is the trap. The compliant thing in your Parnell rental may be a forty-year-old fan whose only virtue is that it still turns, and the day it dies, the standard moves.
Which puts the apartment landlord somewhere genuinely awkward, and this is the part to take advice on rather than read off a blog. There's a general exemption for a landlord who doesn't own the whole building, partially exempting them where their ability to comply is impeded because they need to install something in, or need access to, a part of the building they aren't the sole owner of. A facade is exactly that. But it's a partial exemption, not a pass — you must still take all reasonable steps to comply to the greatest extent reasonably practicable. There's also a specific exemption where it isn't reasonably practicable to install an extractor fan, and the guidance shuts the obvious door on it: a landlord is not exempt where building work is required that would normally be expected when installing an extractor fan, and penetrating a ceiling and fixing ducting are named as exactly that kind of work. So "I'd have to drill a hole" is not the argument. "It isn't my wall to drill" might be. That distinction is worth a lawyer rather than a guess, and the wider Healthy Homes touchpoints in a kitchen are the place to start.
What goes wrong
The vent nobody asked about. An installer who does forty houses a year does what he always does, and the duct goes through the wall because that's where ducts go. Six months later a facade inspection finds a cowl that's on no drawing. Now you're reinstating cladding on a wall that was never yours, at your cost, and you've put an unconsented penetration through the weathertight envelope of a building that may well have a remediation history of its own. In Parnell and Newmarket, plenty do.
The hood that was specced for a duct. Not every rangehood recirculates. Most need a recirculating kit — a carbon cartridge and a discharge path — which is a separate part number, frequently on backorder, and some slimline and fully integrated units don't offer one at all. The hood arrives on time, the kit doesn't, and a kitchen that was five to seven days of work sits at ninety per cent for a fortnight waiting on a box of charcoal.
The switchboard nobody looked at. Induction is generally hardwired to its own circuit, and the rating comes off the appliance's installation instructions, not a brochure. In an older block the surprise is rarely the cooktop — it's the board, the submain, and what's already hanging off them. That's a registered electrician's answer and it wants asking at design stage, not on the day the cooktop is due to go live.
The filter nobody buys. Two months becomes six. Six becomes a year. The hood still runs, the light still works, and nobody connects the smell to the cartridge because nothing announced itself as broken. This is the single most common reason people conclude recirculating hoods are useless. They aren't useless. They're unmaintained.
The rental that quietly stopped complying. The kitchen gets a beautiful refresh, the tired ducted fan comes out because it looked awful, and a smart recirculating hood goes in. The apartment has just gone from compliant to non-compliant on the ventilation standard — during an upgrade, paid for on purpose, by someone trying to do the right thing.
What to ask before you sign anything
- Pull the unit plan. Where is your boundary drawn, and is the external wall inside it or is it common property? Everything downstream hangs off that one line.
- Has anything already been penetrated through your building's facade, and did it go through the body corporate? A precedent that was never consented isn't a precedent you can rely on.
- Does the building hold a compliance schedule and a BWoF, and is there a shared mechanical extract system on it? If yes, your rangehood decision is a building decision.
- Which walls are structural, and does the building have post-tensioned slabs? Get that answered by someone with the drawings before anyone owns a drill.
- Has the concrete been scanned on the exact lines you intend to fix or cut, and who pays if the scan changes the design?
- Does your chosen hood have a recirculating kit, is it in stock, and can the carbon cartridge be reached without dismantling the bulkhead?
- Is the cooktop induction, and has an electrician confirmed the circuit, the board and the submain against the appliance's installation instructions?
- Is the bulkhead on the drawing you're being quoted from, and does the price include building, stopping and painting it — or is it a variation waiting to happen?
- If the apartment is or might become a rental, what's your written position on the ventilation standard, and who gave it to you?
- Does the quote include lift bookings, dock windows, common-area protection and out-of-hours access, or do those turn up later as extras?
Frequently asked questions
Can I duct a rangehood through the outside wall of my Parnell apartment?
Usually not without the body corporate's written consent, and often not at all. On most apartment unit plans the external wall sits outside your unit boundary and falls into common property, and the Unit Titles Act's definition of building elements expressly covers cladding systems and the exterior aesthetics of the building — both of which a new vent and cowl change. The Act also requires you to notify the body corporate of any additions or structural alterations before work starts, and to get written consent where the work materially affects another unit or the common property. Ask in writing before you choose an appliance, because the answer decides the rest of the kitchen.
Is a recirculating rangehood legal in New Zealand?
It isn't banned, but it doesn't meet the Acceptable Solution. G4/AS1 requires spaces in household units containing cooktops to have mechanical extract fans of no less than 50 L/s that exhaust to the outside, and states in its own comment that natural ventilation on its own is not adequate for cooktop moisture. An Acceptable Solution is only one deemed-to-comply route, so an alternative solution is possible — but somebody has to design it and the council has to accept it. In practice the question rarely gets tested on a like-for-like kitchen swap, because that work generally sits inside a Schedule 1 exemption and never reaches a consent officer.
Do I need a building consent to replace the kitchen in a Newmarket apartment?
Usually not, if you stay in the same space and don't increase the number of sanitary fixtures. MBIE's worked example for the Schedule 1 exemption covering alteration to existing sanitary plumbing is a homeowner remodelling an existing kitchen within the same space, leaving the kitchen sink in the same position, with the plumbing done by an authorised person. The condition that catches apartments is that the alteration must not modify or affect any specified system — mechanical ventilation or air conditioning is specified system 9, and many apartment buildings carry it on a compliance schedule. Confirm with Auckland Council if anything in your scope touches a shared system, a fire-rated element or the structure.
Does a recirculating rangehood meet Healthy Homes if I rent my apartment out?
No. The ventilation standard requires an extractor fan that ventilates extracted air to outdoors, and recirculating extractor fans and fans that don't ventilate outdoors are expressly not suitable for meeting it. A landlord who doesn't own the whole building can be partially exempt where their ability to comply is impeded because they need to install something in, or access, a part of the building they aren't the sole owner of — which is what a facade is. It's a partial exemption though, not a pass, and you must still take all reasonable steps to comply to the greatest extent reasonably practicable. Get that position in writing from a lawyer before you rely on it.
Why induction rather than gas if I can't duct anyway?
Because the flame is a second source of contamination in a room with no exit. Gas cooking is a combustion process happening in your kitchen, and it produces water vapour and other combustion by-products on top of the grease and steam from the food itself. A carbon filter is built for grease and odour — Fisher & Paykel describes its charcoal filter as removing grease and odours from cooking vapours before the cleansed air re-enters the kitchen — not for the output of a burner. Induction won't solve ventilation, but it removes the half of the problem you can remove, and in a studio G4/AS1 wants permanent venting to the outside for a gas cooker in a space also used for sleeping.
Send us the address and the answer from your body corporate
We've been building and installing kitchens out of our own East Tamaki workshop for 23 years — over 2,000 of them, ten-plus a week — and a solid share have gone into concrete apartments across Parnell, Newmarket, Remuera and the CBD. We know what a lift booking does to a programme, and what happens when the bulkhead gets drawn last. We're not your lawyer and we won't tell you what your body corporate will say. What we'll do is design around the answer once you have it, instead of pretending the constraint isn't there.
Send the address, a rough scope, and the facade answer if you have it. We'll price off that and get a trade-priced number back inside 24 hours — no showroom, no retail margin, supply and install under one contract and one invoice, so there's nobody to point at when something needs fixing. If the honest answer is that you're recirculating, we'll spec it that way from the start: induction, a hood with a kit that actually exists, a cartridge you can reach, and a bulkhead on the drawing before the first cabinet goes on it.