Ryde Apartment in White Shaker and Stone

The kitchen is a U with a peninsula on the open side. Cooktop and oven sit together on the long run, the sink drops into the corner under the window, and a slimline dishwasher fills the gap beside it. Keeping the sink at the window is why daylight lands on the part of the bench where the work happens.

Shaker fronts run the walls and the peninsula in white, with brushed nickel knobs on the doors and the drawers. The overhead cupboards go up to the ceiling line rather than stopping at head height, which is where a compact kitchen gets back the storage it usually gives up.

The benchtop is a speckled white stone-look surface, and the same material runs up the wall as the splashback in full-height sheets. That leaves no grout behind the cooktop and no tiled join to seal at the back of the bench. An LED strip under the overheads washes light down that wall onto the bench, which is what a kitchen with one small window needs after dark.

The peninsula is the piece that changes how the room gets used. It gives a long clear surface with drawers under the whole length, and it marks where the kitchen ends and the living area starts.

The room is tiled floor to ceiling in large-format porcelain in a soft grey, over a matching floor tile. Fewer, bigger tiles mean fewer grout lines, and grout lines are what make a bathroom start to look its age.

The bath sits along the far wall under the window, with a frameless glass screen and a rain head over it. A shower over the bath is the standard move in a bathroom this size, and it is the reason the room holds both fixtures without giving up floor. A tiled ledge runs off the end of the bath as somewhere to put things down.

The vanity is a wall-hung shaker cabinet in the same profile as the kitchen, carrying a round vessel basin on a stone-look top with a wall-mounted spout above it. A vessel basin sits on the top rather than in it, so the surface stays usable, and the wall spout keeps the tap off the part you have to wipe. Above it is a plain oval mirror, and the tapware, towel ring and knobs are all brushed nickel.

Under the tiles the floor and the shower walls are waterproofed to AS 3740. In an apartment block that membrane is what stands between one bathroom floor and the ceiling below it.

The laundry is a nook and the fit-out treats it as one. A stone-look bench runs the full width over the front-loader, with a stainless undermount sink at the wet end below the window and a two-door shaker cupboard beneath it. The bench does the folding and the cupboard takes the detergent, and the machine still pulls out from under the bench when a plumber needs at it.

Both wet rooms have a window with obscure glass in a painted timber frame, so neither needs a light on during the day. That is worth protecting when you plan the joinery, because a bench or a cupboard in the wrong place blocks the only natural light a small wet room gets.

In the hall, floor-to-ceiling joinery in the same shaker profile takes the linen. Storage in a hallway is the cheapest kind to add in an apartment, because a hall has no furniture competing for the wall.