Kitchen Renovation Plus Glen Iris

The Brief

When Cameron from SE Bathrooms introduced us to this Glen Iris client and her interior designer Sonya Richards, the scale of the project was immediately clear: a complete renovation of the entire ground floor of a substantial family home, including new floors throughout. Kitchen, pantry, laundry, study, mud room, and living room joinery — all to be designed and delivered as a single, cohesive body of work. It's the kind of whole-home brief that demands as much coordination as it does creativity.

The Design

The project came with its share of structural challenges. Load-bearing brick walls throughout the ground floor limited layout options considerably, requiring careful design thinking to work around constraints without compromising the vision. Working through several alternatives with the client and Sonya Richards, the final result is a floor plan that feels open, considered, and entirely intentional — the structural limitations nowhere to be seen in the finished spaces.

The joinery palette across the kitchen, pantry, laundry, study, and living room is built on satin polyurethane in a beautifully considered mix of Dulux Natural Grain and Lexicon Quarter — warm and cool tones in dialogue with each other, creating depth and interest without visual noise. The mud room takes a different direction, finished in Dulux Pipe Clay with a combination of flat face and Tesrol 5026 profiled doors, giving the hardworking entry space its own distinct but complementary character.

Hardware is consistent throughout: Castella 'Clements' handles in Brushed Brass appear alongside finger pull and push-to-open systems — a combination that keeps the cabinetry feeling refined and cohesive from room to room. Polytec Maison Oak Ravine makes a striking contribution as feature floating shelves across the renovation, and as the desktop and bookshelves in the study — a material that brings warmth, texture, and a sense of considered craft to every space it touches.

The benchtop decision was one of the most significant of the project. After exploring several alternatives, natural marble was selected for both the kitchen and laundry benchtops, and extended to the kitchen splashback. Melbourne Marble & Granite sourced and installed Volakas Gold Marble from Gladstones Granite — a luminous, characterful stone that elevates the kitchen to something truly special and provides a natural counterpoint to the polyurethane cabinetry throughout.

The Result

A ground floor transformed. From the kitchen and pantry through to the study, mud room, and living spaces, every room in this Glen Iris home now feels connected by a shared design language — warm, refined, and unmistakably considered. A wonderful collaboration between client, designer, builder, and our team, and one of the most rewarding whole-home projects we've had the pleasure of being part of.