Property
Townhouse
Custom kitchens for townhouses, planned for narrow and deep rooms with a rear service area.
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Feature
Kitchens for Townhouse Living
A townhouse kitchen usually shares its floor with the staircase and the front entry, so the plan has to work in three dimensions rather than across one floor plate. The room is narrow and deep, the width is fixed by the party walls, and the kitchen is frequently the route between the front of the house and the back. That combination means the layout is decided by circulation before it is decided by storage. Get the movement right and a narrow room holds more than expected. Get it wrong and every trip to the back door passes through the cooking.
Highlights
What a Townhouse Kitchen Has to Solve
01
A layout set by the width between the party walls rather than by preference
02
A clear route from the front of the house to the back that does not cross the cooking
03
Storage found in height and in the space under the stairs
04
A back service area planned properly instead of left over
Section 03
The Kitchen as the Route to the Back of the House
In most townhouses the back door, the service yard and often the laundry are reached through the kitchen, so the kitchen is a corridor as well as a room. That route has to stay clear while someone is cooking, which usually means keeping one side free and putting the working run against the opposite wall. Where the route runs down the middle, a single wall of cabinetry works better than two facing runs, even though two runs would hold more. This is the decision that separates a townhouse kitchen from an apartment kitchen of the same size.
Section 04
Which Layout the Width Between the Walls Allows
The width between the party walls decides what is possible before anything else is considered. A narrow room takes a single run along one wall, with the fridge, sink and hob in sequence and the opposite side kept clear. A little more width allows an L-shape, which adds a corner and a second working edge. Two facing runs need enough space between them for drawers and appliance doors to open with someone standing in the middle, and in most townhouses that is exactly the width that is not there. Measuring the gap rather than the room answers the question.
Section 05
What the Staircase Takes and What It Gives Back
The staircase takes floor area out of the middle of the plan and gives back a volume underneath it that is usually wasted. Under a straight flight there is room for a tall pull-out pantry at the high end and shallower storage as the headroom drops. Fitted properly it holds what a full tall unit would hold, without taking any of the wall the kitchen needs. The other thing the stairs do is fix where the walls are, since the flight and its landing rarely move, so the kitchen is planned around them rather than the other way round.
Section 06
Extraction in a House Where Smells Rise
A townhouse stacks its rooms, so what happens in the kitchen travels upwards rather than sideways. Cooking smells rise through the stairwell to the bedrooms above far more readily than they spread across an open-plan floor, and an extractor that would be adequate in a detached house is not adequate here. Size it for the hob rather than for the cabinet width, duct it outside where the layout allows, and run it after cooking rather than only during. Noise behaves the same way, which is why a quiet extractor is worth more in a vertical house.
Section 07
The Service Area Behind the Kitchen
Behind most townhouse kitchens there is a small yard or covered area that ends up holding the washing machine, the drying rack, the bins and often a burner for the cooking that is too heavy to do indoors. Treating that as part of the design rather than as leftover space changes both areas. The indoor kitchen stops having to absorb the laundry and the wok, and the outdoor area gets a proper worktop, a sink and storage that stays dry. Where the two are planned together, the back door position and the services follow from that decision.
Section 08
What Cannot Move in a Townhouse
Some things in a townhouse are fixed. The party walls are structural, the position of the drainage stack rarely changes, the ceiling is often lower than in a detached house, and the frontage is narrow enough that a long worktop slab may not turn into the room. None of this stops a kitchen being built well, but all of it belongs in the survey rather than in a revision. Knowing the ceiling height early decides whether the cabinetry can run full height, and knowing the access decides whether the worktop arrives whole or jointed on site.
Section 09
Making the Longest Wall Do the Work
In a narrow room the longest wall is the only real asset, so it has to be used completely. Full-height cabinetry along that run adds a tier of storage that costs nothing on the floor, and where the ceiling is lower it also removes the gap that would make the proportions feel squat. The oven goes into a tall unit at eye level rather than under the hob, which frees the base cabinet beneath it. Whatever sits on the opposite side is kept shallow, because every centimetre taken from that wall comes straight out of the walkway.
Section 10
Bringing Daylight Into the Middle of a Deep Plan
A deep plan has windows at the front and the back and nothing in between, and the kitchen frequently sits in the middle where the daylight does not reach. That is a lighting problem rather than a colour problem, although pale finishes help at the margins. Under-cabinet lighting along the working run does most of the work. Where the structure allows, a rooflight or an opening borrowed towards the rear brings daylight into the centre of the floor and changes the room more than any finish will. It is worth asking about early rather than late.
Highlights
What You Get in a Well-Planned Townhouse Kitchen
01
Storage found in height and under the stairs instead of taken from the floor
02
A working run that stays out of the route between the front door and the back
03
A back service area with its own worktop, sink and dry storage
04
Extraction sized for a house where cooking smells rise through the stairwell
Ready to plan your Townhouse kitchen?
Send us the ground floor plan with the staircase and the back door marked, and tell us what happens in the yard behind the kitchen. We will tell you which layout the width allows, how the route to the back can be kept clear, and what the space under the stairs can be made to hold.