4 August 2026 Kitchen Joinery News

Laundry Design Melbourne: Layouts, Storage and Custom Joinery

Melbourne Laundry Design

The best laundry in the house is the one you cannot see

How Melbourne homes are getting proper laundries out of hallway cupboards, awkward corners and rooms the size of a wardrobe — and what it takes to plan one properly.

KJoinery Australia · Updated August 2026 · 9 min read

The short version

Good laundry design is mostly concealment

Quick answer

A well-designed Melbourne laundry hides the appliances behind full-height doors, puts a bench over the machines to fold on, and gets everything else — baskets, detergent, the vacuum, the ironing board — behind those same doors. Space is rarely the problem. Planning is.

Almost nobody asks us for a bigger laundry. What they ask for is a laundry that does not look like a laundry — no exposed machines, no baskets on the floor, no detergent bottles on the windowsill. That is a joinery problem far more than it is a floor-space problem.

Melbourne housing makes this interesting. A Federation home in Brunswick has a laundry off the back that was never designed at all. A new estate house in Tarneit has a narrow galley between the garage and the kitchen. An apartment in South Yarra has a cupboard, and that cupboard has to be the laundry. Three completely different rooms, one design question: where does everything go so that none of it is visible?

The rest of this guide is how we answer that — the layouts that work in Melbourne homes, the order things need to happen in, and the decisions that quietly determine whether a laundry is pleasant to use or merely tolerable. It applies whether you are pricing custom laundry cabinets for a single wall or planning a full laundry cabinetry fitout.

The idea, in one photo

An entire laundry, in a hallway cupboard

This is a real one we built. From the hallway it is a run of timber doors — no handles fighting the wall, no hint of what is behind them. Open it and there is a sink, a washing machine, a benchtop, shelving and enough storage for everything a laundry actually needs.

Concealed European laundry behind flush timber doors in a Melbourne hallway by KJoinery Australia

The same hallway cupboard opened to reveal a full European laundry with sink, washing machine and shelving

Open the doors

European laundry Full-height doors, sink, benchtop over the machine, and shelving above. Closed, it reads as a wall.

If you can walk past your laundry without noticing it, the joinery has done its job.

This is what Melbourne calls a European laundry — a euro laundry, or European-style laundry — and it is the single most requested thing we build. Ours is a full write-up on the European laundry we fitted in Brunswick if you want to see the detail of how one goes together.

Three layouts

The three laundries Melbourne homes actually have

Nearly every laundry we are asked to design is one of these three. Which one you have decides most of the rest.

European laundry with side by side washer and dryer under a bench in Melbourne by KJoinery Australia

Type one

The cupboard laundry

A run of full-height joinery in a hallway, under a stair or off the kitchen. Machines stacked or side by side, everything behind doors.

Best for apartments and smaller homes

Galley laundry with white cabinetry, stone benchtop and open shelving in Melbourne by KJoinery Australia

Type two

The galley laundry

A narrow room with cabinetry down one wall. A continuous bench over the machines, overhead cupboards, and a proper sink at one end.

Best for estate homes and townhouses

Laundry and powder room combination with vanity and custom cabinetry in Melbourne by KJoinery Australia

Type three

The laundry and powder room

One room doing two jobs. A vanity and toilet at one end, laundry joinery at the other, with the wet zones planned together.

Best for renovations adding a second toilet

The mistake we see most often is trying to force type two into a type one space. If the room is genuinely narrow, a single wall of well-planned joinery beats cabinetry on both sides that you cannot stand between with a basket in your hands.

Full height European laundry cabinetry in a Melbourne home by KJoinery Australia

The whole trick

Every laundry has the same amount of floor. The good ones just use the wall.

Taking joinery to the ceiling is the cheapest storage in the room, and it is the difference between a laundry you close the door on and one you keep tidy.

Plan around the sequence

Design it in the order washing actually happens

This is the part most laundry designs skip, and it is the one that decides whether the room is pleasant. Walk it through in order before anything is drawn.

Quick answer

Laundry is one of the few rooms in a house with a genuine sequence: sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. Lay the joinery out in that order along the bench and the room works. Lay it out by what fits and you will carry wet washing past the folding space every time.

Sort. Baskets need a home that is not the floor. Pull-out hampers under the bench, ideally two, so sorting happens once rather than every wash. This is the item most often left out of a quote — ask for it specifically.
Wash. The machine goes where the plumbing is, and moving it is the most expensive decision in the room. If it can stay put, the budget goes into joinery instead of trades.
Dry. A dryer stacked above the washer saves a metre of bench. If you line-dry, you still need somewhere for the rack — a tall narrow cupboard beside the machines is the answer, and it is easy to add at design stage and impossible later.
Fold. An uninterrupted stretch of bench, at least 900 mm, over the machines. This is the single most valuable surface in the room and the first thing sacrificed when a sink is put in the wrong place.
Put away. Shelving above the bench for linen and cleaning supplies, and a full-height cupboard for the vacuum, mop and ironing board. If these do not have a home in the joinery, they end up in the hallway.

Read that list again and you will notice the sink is not on it. A sink matters, but it should sit at the end of the run rather than the middle — interrupting the bench between wash and fold is what makes a laundry feel cramped no matter how big it is.

One we changed

Same room, same footprint

Nothing structural moved here. The window stayed, the door stayed, the plumbing stayed. Everything that changed is joinery and planning — which is the point.

Melbourne laundry before renovation with a dated freestanding tub and no storage — Before

The same Melbourne laundry after custom joinery with full height cabinetry and a bench over the machines — After

The before is a room most Melbourne homeowners will recognise: a freestanding tub, a length of exposed hose, and storage that amounts to whatever fits on top of the machine. The after has the same square metreage and roughly four times the usable storage, because the vertical space between bench and ceiling stopped being wasted.

That is the honest summary of most laundry renovations we do. The room does not get bigger. The walls start working.

Custom laundry cabinets with 2pac doors and stone benchtop in Melbourne by KJoinery Australia

Cabinets and doors

Custom laundry cabinets, cupboards and doors

Most of what people call a laundry renovation is really custom laundry cabinets. The machines stay where they are, the plumbing stays where it is, and what changes is the cabinetry wrapped around them.

Laundry cabinets in Melbourne homes almost always want to be full height. Standard-height laundry cupboards leave a dust gap at the top and force everything bulky back out into the room. Taking laundry cabinetry to the ceiling is the cheapest storage on the quote.

Doors are the other half of it. Hinged doors are the most economical and the easiest to live with. Bifold laundry doors fold flat so they do not block a narrow hallway, and pocket doors disappear entirely, which is what makes a euro laundry read as a wall of joinery rather than a cupboard.

We build all of it in our own workshop — see our laundry joinery and custom laundry cabinets across Melbourne.

Materials

What to specify in a wet room

A laundry is the hardest-working wet area in the house and gets none of the attention a bathroom does. These are the specifications that matter.

Board grade

High-moisture-resistance board throughout, not just under the sink. A laundry sees more steam and more spills than any other room. See our guide to which board grade belongs where.

Benchtop

Laminate is perfectly good here and takes a hot iron better than most people expect. Stone looks superb and is worth it if the laundry is visible from the kitchen.

Doors

Full-height where possible. Bifold or pocket doors for a cupboard laundry so the doors do not block the hallway when open.

Splashback

Run it the full height behind the sink and the machines. A 150 mm upstand is where water gets behind the cabinetry.

Ventilation

A concealed laundry needs airflow. A vented door detail or a small exhaust stops damp sitting in a closed cupboard.

Hardware

Soft-close everything, and handles you can open with wet hands. Push-to-open looks clean but is unforgiving when your hands are full.

Avoid these

Five things people regret about their laundry

The sink in the middle of the bench. It splits the one continuous surface you needed for folding. Put it at the end.
No home for the drying rack. It ends up leaning in a hallway for the life of the house. A 300 mm tall cupboard solves it and costs almost nothing at design stage.
Stopping the cabinetry short of the ceiling. The gap collects dust and stores nothing. Full height is barely more expensive and is where the seasonal storage goes.
Moving the plumbing for a nicer layout. Sometimes right, often not. It brings in a plumber and a tiler and can cost more than the joinery it was meant to improve.
Forgetting the door swing. In a small laundry the machine door, the room door and the cupboard doors can all want the same square metre. Worth checking on the plan, not on installation day.

If you want the full service detail rather than the design thinking, that is our laundry joinery work across Melbourne — designed, built and installed by the same team.

Dimensions

How much space a laundry actually needs

These are the numbers we work to, and they are worth knowing before you fall in love with a layout. Most disappointment in laundry design comes from discovering a constraint after the design is drawn.

Quick answer

A concealed European laundry needs about 900 mm of width and 650 mm of depth for a front-loader with a bench over it. A galley laundry works from about 1.8 m of wall. Below those numbers you are choosing between a machine and storage, not fitting both.

Cupboard laundry

From 900 mm wide and 650 mm deep. That fits one front-loader with a bench over it and a shallow shelf above. Add 300 mm of width and you gain a broom cupboard beside it.

Side-by-side machines

From 1.4 m wide. Comfortable, but stacking instead frees roughly 700 mm for storage in the same opening, which is usually the better trade.

Galley laundry

From about 1.8 m of usable wall. Below that you cannot get machines, a folding bench and a sink onto one run without one of them being compromised.

Walkway clearance

Leave at least 900 mm in front of the machines. That is enough to open a front-loader door fully and still stand there with a basket.

Bench height

900 mm standard, and it must clear the machine plus its levelling feet. Measure the actual appliance rather than trusting the brochure, because a few millimetres decide whether the bench sits flat.

Folding run

900 mm of uninterrupted bench is the minimum worth having. Anything shorter becomes a shelf that things get put down on rather than a surface you work at.

The one worth repeating is the walkway. We have been asked more than once to squeeze cabinetry into a laundry until the machine door will not open past ninety degrees. It fits on the plan and it is unusable in life. If the room forces that choice, the joinery on the opposite wall should get shallower rather than the walkway getting narrower.

Storage

Where everything goes when nothing is on show

Concealing a laundry only works if the joinery genuinely absorbs what used to sit out. Run through this list against your own laundry and you will find the two or three items that always end up homeless.

Two hampers, not one. Sorting happens once if there are two pull-out baskets under the bench, and continuously if there is one. This is the cheapest quality-of-life item in the whole room.
The tall, narrow cupboard. Vacuum, mop, broom, ironing board and the drying rack all want the same 300 to 400 mm of full-height space. Without it they live in a hallway forever.
Detergent within reach of the machine. A shallow cupboard or a pull-out beside the washer, not across the room. Anything stored more than an arm away from where it is used ends up back on the bench.
Linen above the bench. Adjustable shelving from bench height to ceiling. Towels and sheets are light and bulky, which makes them ideal for the high shelves people otherwise waste.
A drawer for the small things. Pegs, spare buttons, stain remover, the lint brush. One shallow drawer stops the entire benchtop becoming that drawer.

The test we use is simple. Stand in the finished laundry and ask what is visible on the benchtop. In a well-planned room the answer is nothing, or a single thing you chose to leave there. If the answer is detergent, a basket and the iron, the joinery came up short somewhere on that list.

A laundry is not tidy because someone tidies it. It is tidy because everything in it has somewhere to go.

Common questions

Laundry design, answered plainly

How do you design a small laundry in Melbourne?

Work vertically and conceal everything. Use full-height joinery so the space between bench and ceiling stores the things that usually clutter the room, stack the dryer above the washer to free up bench, and put a continuous folding surface over the machines. In a genuinely small room, cabinetry down one wall works better than both walls.

What is a European laundry?

A laundry concealed within joinery rather than given its own room, usually behind full-height doors in a hallway, kitchen or under a stair. It contains a washing machine, often a dryer stacked above, a small sink or bench, and storage. Closed, it reads as a wall of cabinetry.

Do I need a sink in my laundry?

Not always. If you have a laundry sink you rarely use, that space is often better spent on bench and storage. If you hand-wash, soak or fill buckets regularly, keep it, but put it at the end of the run rather than the middle so the folding bench stays continuous.

Can a laundry and powder room share one space?

Yes, and it is a common Melbourne renovation because it adds a second toilet without adding a room. The two wet zones need to be planned together so plumbing, ventilation and door swings work, and the joinery should visually separate the vanity end from the laundry end.

What board should laundry cabinetry be made from?

High-moisture-resistance board throughout, not just beneath the sink. A laundry sees steam, spills and damp air more consistently than a kitchen does, and standard board will swell at any unsealed edge.

Should laundry cabinetry go to the ceiling?

Almost always. The gap above standard-height cupboards collects dust and stores nothing. Taking joinery full height costs a modest amount more and is usually where the seasonal and bulky storage ends up, which is what keeps the rest of the room clear.

Where we build

Laundry joinery across Melbourne

We design, build and install laundry cabinetry across Melbourne, from concealed European laundries in apartments to full galley fitouts in family homes. Laundry room cabinet design in Chadstone, Glen Waverley and Springvale makes up a good share of our south-eastern work, alongside the western suburbs where our factory is.