What makes a kitchen modern
A modern kitchen is a flat door and a clean line: no frames, no profiles, and either a slim bar handle or none at all. What remains is the material itself, so the material has to be worth looking at. In the kitchen above that material is oak, run vertically, with the grain continuing across every door and drawer so the whole wall reads as one board. Beside it, white. Under it, a white stone bench so thin and plain it almost disappears. That is the entire palette, and the room is better for it.
People sometimes hear “modern” and expect cold. It isn’t, or it needn’t be. Timber does the warming. The trick is restraint: one strong material, one quiet one, and everything else hidden behind a flat door.
How we build it
A finger-pull kitchen is the hardest kind to make well, because there is nowhere to hide. Every gap is visible, every edge is on show, and a door that is a millimetre out of line announces itself from across the room. We cut and edge the flat fronts ourselves, so the shadow gaps are even and the grain runs on from door to door because it was planned on the computer before the sheet was cut; a profiled or wrapped door comes from Polytec or Modernform to our sizes. The recessed rail under each drawer is a fitted aluminium section in black or white, not a routed groove, which means it stays crisp and does not chip the way a routed edge can.
The door we would use here is a flat Woodmatt board front, or a Polytec Vista or Surano framed door with a Woodmatt insert, which gives you a vertical grain without the movement of veneer and wipes clean. Like veneer, it should be kept out of continuous direct sun, so a north-facing window gets a conversation either way. If you want the real thing, we also work in oak veneer with a matching solid edge, at a higher price.
Benchtops in a modern kitchen are usually 20 mm with a square edge, so the stone reads as a plane rather than a slab. Appliances are integrated wherever the budget allows: the dishwasher and fridge behind matching fronts, the rangehood inside the uppers, the oven at eye height in a tall unit.
In a Perth home
Modern kitchens suit almost every Perth house built after 1990, and they are the most forgiving style for an open-plan room, because a flat oak run reads as furniture rather than as kitchen when you look at it from the couch. They are also the right answer for a narrow galley: no frames means no visual weight, and a light timber against white makes a small room feel wider than it is.
The one place we steer people away is the period home with ornate cornices and a formal dining room next door. A flat modern run can look like it wandered in from another house. There, a traditional or Hamptons kitchen belongs.
What it costs
A modern kitchen from us typically lands between $38,000 and $55,000 for the joinery: designed, made in our Malaga workshop and installed. Benchtop stone, appliances and the trades are separate bills, and we say what they are on the pricing page. Flat fronts are quicker to make than profiled ones, which is where the saving over Hamptons comes from. The money moves with the choice of finish and with how many appliances you integrate. A stone splashback changes the stone bill, not ours.
