Kitchen Plus Renovation Mount Dandenong

Kitchen & Whole Home Renovation: Mount Dandenong

Project – Kitchen, Robes, Laundry, Vanities +
Suburb – Mount Dandenong, Melbourne
Designer – Chris Wing Shing, My Clients and the late Peter Chrone
Builder - KBS Developments
Photographer – Axis Kitchens & Maison Snap

The Brief

Some projects stay with you. This Mount Dandenong renovation is one of them.

Introduced to the clients through Michael of KBS Developments, the brief carried a weight that went well beyond cabinetry and benchtops. Their home — 'The Charge House', originally designed in 1979 by the late architect Peter Chrone — had been damaged by two enormous mountain ash trees that fell on the property. Previous owners had already altered much of Chrone's original architectural vision over the years, and our clients saw the rebuild as an opportunity to honour what had been lost: restoring the home's defining features with a contemporary sensibility, guided by original documentation they had carefully preserved.

The Design

The kitchen was always going to be the heart of the project. One of Peter Chrone's most distinctive original details was a set of floating overhead cabinets that divided the kitchen from the main living area — a feature removed in previous renovations that our clients were determined to bring back, reimagined at a larger scale. Achieving floating overheads without the visual intrusion of a conventional rangehood and ducting was resolved beautifully by the clients' decision to specify a Bora downdraught rangehood system, keeping the overhead joinery clean, unobstructed, and true to the spirit of the original design. A floating island bench and Chrone's signature angled details complete the kitchen's architectural story.

The joinery throughout the kitchen, robes, and laundry is finished in Dulux Natural White satin polyurethane — warm, clean, and perfectly calibrated to sit alongside the home's stunning timber-lined ceilings completed by the KBS team. Caesarstone Nougat benchtops run through the kitchen and laundry, their soft, earthy tone in quiet conversation with the natural materials throughout the home. The vanities and living room joinery take a different direction, finished in reclaimed timber with Caesarstone Osprey benchtops — a stone with more depth and character that suits the intimacy of these spaces beautifully.

The reclaimed timber is the soul of this renovation. When the mountain ash trees fell on the home, the clients made the remarkable decision to salvage as much of the timber as possible, engaging a specialist to mill and dry it for use throughout the rebuild. It appears as floating shelves and a seating bench in the kitchen and laundry, as vanity fronts in the bathrooms, and as living room joinery fronts and benchtops — a material that carries the history of the property itself into every room it touches. There is simply nothing like it.

The Result

To describe every detail of this renovation would require more words than the project deserves to be reduced to. What the clients, KBS Developments, and our team have achieved here is something rare: a home that has been genuinely restored — not just renovated — with its original architectural spirit brought back to life and deepened by the story of what it has been through. The reclaimed mountain ash alone tells that story better than any words can. We hope our clients enjoy their extraordinary home for many years to come.