If I Was Designing Your Kitchen: 5 Things I'd Get Right Before the Pretty Stuff
Every kitchen renovation starts the same way. A Pinterest board full of stone benchtops, brass tapware and statement pendant lights. The pretty stuff.
But if you hired me to design your kitchen, the pretty stuff wouldn't be where we started. After fifteen years as an interior designer and currently renovating my own kitchen, I can tell you that the kitchens people love living in, year after year, are the ones where the functional decisions were made properly before the finishes were chosen.
Here are the five things I'd get right first.
1. The flow around your island
This is the most common question I see people asking before they renovate — how much space do I need around my kitchen island? And it's the right question, because most kitchens are designed around how the island looks, not how people actually move through the space.
You need enough clearance on every side. Enough to open every drawer fully without hitting a wall or a person. Enough room for someone to walk past while you're cooking. Enough width for two people to work at the same time without colliding.
The general rule is a minimum of 1000-1200mm of clearance around an island for comfortable movement, though this depends on your overall kitchen footprint. Get this wrong and no amount of beautiful stone fixes it — you'll feel the friction every single day.
2. Bench height and depth that suits your household
What is the standard kitchen bench height in Australia is one of the most searched kitchen renovation questions — and the honest answer is that "standard" isn't always right for you.
Standard benchtop height in Australia is 900mm, but that range comfortably extends from 850mm to 1000mm depending on the height of the people using the kitchen most. If you're significantly taller or shorter than average, sticking rigidly to 900mm because it's standard means designing a kitchen that's uncomfortable to use every day.
The same goes for benchtop depth. Standard is 600mm, but if you've got a deep fridge or want extra bench space for food preparation, this is a decision to make consciously — not default to.
3. Storage before styling
Everyone wants beautiful open shelving and a styled pantry. Almost nobody plans where things will actually live before the cabinetry is built.
This is where kitchens go wrong after the renovation is finished — not during it. You move in, your homewares don't have a home, and within months your beautiful new kitchen has bench clutter because there was never a proper plan for where everything goes.
Before your cabinetry is finalised, map out where your appliances live, where your pantry items go, where bins and recycling are stored, and where the everyday items you use multiple times a day will be kept. Storage planning is not a styling decision. It's a functional one that needs to happen early.
4. Lighting layers, not just pendants
Downlights and pendants over the island are not a lighting plan. They're one layer of a lighting plan that needs at least three.
Good kitchen lighting includes ambient lighting for the overall space, task lighting for food preparation areas — usually under cabinet lighting over your bench — and feature lighting like pendants over an island for atmosphere and style.
This needs to be planned before electrical rough in, which happens early in your renovation, long before you're choosing pendant styles. Switch positions, dimmer requirements and colour temperature all need to be decided in advance. Get this wrong and you're either living with flat, uninspiring light or paying an electrician to come back.
5. Power points and appliance planning before cabinetry
Where should kitchen power points go is a question that comes up constantly — and it needs to be answered before your cabinetry is built, not after.
Your appliance placement determines your power point positions. Your microwave, your kettle, your coffee machine, any built in appliances — all of it needs to be planned so your electrician installs power points in the right place and your cabinetmaker builds around them correctly.
Change your mind after cabinetry is installed and you're either compromising on appliance placement or paying for rework.
Why this order matters
None of these five decisions are about taste. They're about function — and they all need to happen before the finishes get chosen, not after.
The kitchens that work beautifully years after the renovation is finished aren't the ones with the most expensive stone. They're the ones where someone thought through how the space would actually be used, before a single tile was chosen.
If you're planning a kitchen renovation right now, this is the order to work through it in. The Renovation Complete Pack gives you the fixture and finishes schedule, measurement guides, storage planning and more to document every one of these decisions, room by room, before your build begins.
Available at measureandmark.com.au