Kitchen Design Blog & Guides

You have three quotes on the table, all within a few hundred euro of each other. That is where most people relax and pay a deposit, and where the budget stops being accurate. Those numbers price the kitchen: cabinets, worktop, doors, labour. The rest arrives afterwards in pieces, once the deposit is gone. Below is […]

You have two quotes on the table. One is €12,400, the other €18,900, and both say “supply and fit” for what looks like the same kitchen. Nobody has told you what the extra €6,500 buys. It might be quartz instead of laminate. It might be four pan drawers, a larder and branded runners. It might […]

Count how many times a drawer gets opened in your kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday. The cutlery drawer alone will take forty or fifty pulls before the dinner things are washed up. Nothing else in the room works that hard, which is why drawers are where a cheap kitchen shows itself first, and most of […]

You’ve priced a kitchen, you’ve seen that the same 600mm base unit comes in two versions, and one of them is cheaper. That’s usually where the flat pack versus pre-assembled question starts, and it’s the wrong place to start. The price gap is smaller than most people expect, and what actually decides it is more […]

Put two flat pack kitchen quotes side by side and the differences you notice are all on the front: door colour, handle style, whether the drawers are soft-close. The €1,500 gap between them almost never sits there. It sits in the boxes behind the doors, in board thickness you can’t see once the kitchen is […]

Nobody notices a wall unit hung at the right height. They notice the one that isn’t. It’s the press you crack your head off leaning over the sink, or the top shelf you quietly gave up on and now use for the good delft twice a year. Base units forgive a lot, because you’re always […]

Ask for a quote on new kitchen presses and the document that comes back is full of the word “unit”. Ask the fitter standing in your kitchen with a tape measure and he’ll call the same object a press. A catalogue printed in Britain calls it a cupboard; one written for the American market calls […]

Kitchen plans devote plenty of attention to doors, worktops and appliances. Plinths, cornices and pelmets are often reduced to a few lines near the bottom of the order, even though they determine whether the cabinets look properly finished when the kitchen is installed. These pieces are not interchangeable. A plinth closes the gap below base […]

An affordable kitchen is not necessarily the kitchen with the lowest figure at the bottom of the first quote. It is the kitchen that gives you a sound layout, reliable cabinets and a finish you are happy to live with, without spending heavily on details that add little to daily use. That distinction matters. Two […]

Almost every kitchen showroom in Dublin looks good on a Saturday walk-through — that’s what showrooms are designed to do. The differences that actually matter, the ones that decide whether your renovation goes smoothly or turns into six months of chasing someone for a fix, don’t show up in the display units at all. They […]

The splashback tends to get decided in the last few weeks of a kitchen project, often as an afterthought once the cabinets, worktop and appliances are already chosen. That’s understandable, but it’s also how a lot of people end up with a splashback that doesn’t quite work with everything else in the room. This guide […]

Most homeowners start their worktop decision with a colour in mind, not a material. That’s the right instinct — the colour is what you’ll actually look at every day, while the material mostly determines price and durability. This guide sets out what’s genuinely selling in Irish kitchens right now, how to pair a worktop colour […]