Murrumbeena VIC — Kitchen guide · Compact rooms
Small kitchen ideas that work harder than the footprint.
A small kitchen is not a shrunken version of a large one. It is a tighter brief: fewer metres of bench, less wall to hang joinery on, and no room for a drawer that opens into a doorway. Plan the run first, reclaim the depth and height the room already owns, then choose finishes that stop it reading as full.
No obligation
Reference photograph — an L-shape working two walls, with one uninterrupted bench run
Layout first — the room usually tells you which plan it wants
Compact rooms in units and post-war cottages nearly always arrive with one plan already implied by the plumbing wall, the window and the doorways. Settle that before you settle a door colour, because the layout decides how much continuous benchtop you finish with — and benchtop is what small kitchens run out of first. The three plans below cover almost every compact room; the wider comparison, including islands, sits in our guide to kitchen layouts.
01 Two runs
Galley
Two parallel runs with a walkway between them. It yields more bench per square metre than any other compact plan, provided the gap stays wide enough for an oven door and a dishwasher door to open without meeting. Cook on one side, wash and store on the other.
02 One run
Single wall
Everything on one line, usually with a tall unit at each end to bank the storage. It suits rooms that are also a corridor. Bench is the weak point, so protect one clear stretch between sink and cooktop and push the fridge to an end rather than the middle.
03 Corner
L-shape
Two adjoining walls, leaving the rest of the room free for a table or a narrow bench. Good in open-plan units. The corner cabinet is the decision that counts — a blind corner fitted with a pull-out mechanism earns its cost in a room this size.
The depth and height you already own
Most compact kitchens waste more space inside the joinery than on the floor plan. A base cupboard hides half a metre of unreachable depth behind the first row of things; the same carcass built as a drawer bank hands all of it back every time you pull it open. Deep drawers for pots, shallow ones with cutlery inserts, and a single pot drawer under the cooktop change how the room feels more than any finish will.
Overhead, carry the cabinets to the ceiling instead of stopping short and leaving a dust shelf — the top row holds what you reach for twice a year. Slimline and integrated appliances finish the job: a narrower dishwasher, a shallower fridge cavity and a rangehood set into the joinery return centimetres you can actually stand in. The hardware behind all of it is covered under Kitchen Storage Solutions.
Reference photograph — a drawer bank returning the full depth of the carcass
Eight moves that make a small kitchen feel larger
None of these add floor area. They remove the visual interruptions and dead volume that make a compact room read as cramped.
Rooms this applies to
These are the kitchens the area is full of — single-fronted cottages around Murrumbeena, two-bedroom units through Carnegie and Hughesdale, and the tight rear kitchens of post-war homes in Oakleigh, Chadstone and Ormond. Nine or ten square metres, one plumbing wall, and everything a family kitchen has to do. Fitting them out properly is the whole of Small Kitchen Renovations.
Read next
Related services
Murrumbeena VIC — Next step
Send the measurements of your room and we will draw the plan it suits.
A compact kitchen rewards decisions made in the right order — layout, then storage, then finishes. Tell us about the room through the contact form, or start a free quote below.
No obligation