An exhaustive guide to building a modular kitchen in the Philippines, from floor layouts to cabinet materials.
If you’ve spoken to a friend who’s built a kitchen before, prepare for a horror story. “I spent twice the budget! 6 months delayed! He’s a scammer!”
Kitchens can be confusing and convoluted if you don’t know what you’re doing. In this guide, we’re hoping we can help you navigate this long process.
In this post, we’ll assume that you’re going to build a modular kitchen, not a carpentry one.
Unfortunately, kitchen pricing isn’t as transparent as buying soy sauce in the grocery.
But walking to a supplier and requesting a price is like asking the cashier at Uniqlo if you’ll look good in their underwear. They can’t tell you without understanding a few things.
What makes a kitchen expensive?
But we’re guessing you just want a starting point just so you know what you can afford. As an exercise, let’s set a baseline just to start somewhere. Pretend we’re building a kitchen like this:
For a kitchen with these specs, prices can look something like:
In kitchens, higher prices usually means better quality.
But better in what ways?
So you just pay more if you can? Is that the rule? Not all the time.
For most folks who just want a great-looking kitchen that works, stay somewhere around mid-range to low luxury. At this range, you’ll notice a huge leap in quality compared to lower end kitchens. You’re going from food court steak to a USDA Certified Angus Ribeye.
But beyond the mid-range, the practical gains shrink.
Luxury kitchens work much like luxury watches. A Rolex doesn’t tell the time better than a Swatch. But people still buy them for prestige and artistry. Luxury kitchens will use brand name accessories, rare materials, and high-tech devices. They’re great to have, but they will usually triple or quadruple the price of your entire kitchen.
Your kitchen layout can make your life easier or harder depending how well you pull it off. Naturally you don’t want to make it harder, so make sure you consider every decision.
And even if you have an interior designer, you’d best arm yourself with knowledge. They won’t be the ones using your kitchen for the next 10 or 20 years, you will.
If you want something crazy, go ahead and build yourself a triangular kitchen. But what if you’re not unhinged?
Here are the four most common layouts:
All of these kitchen layouts work, just choose one that fits your needs.
One thing to consider with any layout is the amount of corners. Remember that corners are hard to access—you have to reach deep underneath—so you’ll need to spend a bit more to make use of corner cabinets. So if you want to save a bit of money, you may want to ditch the corners.
The triangle refers to the 3 most used stations in your kitchen: cooking, washing, and refrigeration.
The kitchen triangle states that you want these 3 stations within a short distance of each other, forming an imaginary triangle that defines where you work.
That means you shouldn’t put all 3 stations on one side of the kitchen. You also shouldn’t position them so far apart.
You can break the rule, but the triangle helps you work easier. By having them in this layout, you can just rotate your body to access different areas in the kitchen instead of walking far away just to get something in the fridge or dumping a dirty pot in the sink.
While cooking, washing, and refrigeration form your holy trinity, there’s another one that people often miss: drying.
Every time you wash your dishes, make sure you have an accessible dumping ground for your wet dishes. Position your drying area right beside your sink works best—and even better if you purchase a drying rack that drains to the sink. Some kitchens also add a drying area above the sink.
Consider which side it sits on too. Dish dryers should be as big as possible to be useful. If you position them on the side of the sink where you chop your vegetables or plate your food, you’ll block your work area.
To prevent this from happening, position your drying station somewhere outside your work area. This way, you can just slide dirty pots, pans, and chopping boards to your sink without having to go around your work area.
When building kitchens, don’t screw up your measurements. If you misfire, you might end up spending hundreds of thousands more.
When you work with a reputable modular kitchen supplier, they won’t make your kitchen in your house. They build entire kitchens in a factory. Once done, they bring it to your house and assemble the parts like Legos. With wrong measurements, your cabinets won’t fit when they arrive.
Before you call someone to build your kitchen, make sure that the physical space where the kitchen will go is ready to be measured by your supplier.
If you’re working with an architect or interior designer, you might have a floor plan in hand. Don’t rely on it. In practice, floor plans don’t reflect reality so accurately. The plan usually ends up a couple of inches off from reality—and this is a big deal when it comes to kitchens.
If you cook steaks, chops, or fish, you’ll produce a huge amount of smoke.
While you might tell yourself that having huge windows and fans is enough, it usually isn’t. If you’re in a condo, you might set off the smoke alarm too.
As a precaution, always buy the most powerful exhaust you can. Ask the seller about suction ratings and they’ll let you know and compare which ones do a better job.
Water is pretty straightforward. You just need a pipe where it enters and a drain where it exits. But you can add a few things to make your washing experience better.
We recommend you go fully electric and ditch gas for your kitchen.
Most people think that if you have outlets, you can just plug any appliances into them. Not true! Your kitchen needs enough electrical capacity to power all your devices: your cooktop, a microwave, an oven, blenders, and whatnot. Talk to your electrician to know how much you can plug.
Consider where you’ll be working too. Your primary work area should have outlets close by so you can easily plug small appliances like hand blenders and food processors.
Your cooktop is the most important appliance you’ll buy. When choosing one, you’ll need to make 3 choices.
We keep on getting asked what brands we recommend. Most of the popular brands work decently and similarly—even the pricey ones. So just buy whichever you can afford. What you want to know is how good the service is. Ask your suppliers what their service policy looks like.
If you see kitchen catalogues, you’ll find that they have built-in ovens usually under the cooktop. Whether you need one for yourself depends on how much you bake or roast.
If you don’t really use an oven, you might consider just using the space as a cabinet. If you’re using an induction cooktop, you can place a cabinet under it easily.
If you’re only toasting bread or baking cookies, you might find that a smaller countertop oven might be more than enough for your needs.
One huge benefit to working with premium modular kitchen suppliers is that you’ll get access to a lot of space-maximizing mechanisms.
Every kitchen benefits from more space. Since you always want as much space as possible, consider the following:
Sometimes you’ll end up with a kitchen layout where you’ll get left with a small space where a full-sized cabinet just won’t fit. Since kitchen cabinets go deep, adding a regular cabinet doesn’t help as you won’t be able to access the rear. In these cases, you can opt to install a narrow cabinet mechanism.
If you have an L or U-shaped kitchen, you’ll come across corners. Corners waste space because they’re so deep. To make use of corner space, you can install different styles of corner mechanisms.
You still have enough room below and around your sink that often goes to waste. With a proper under-sink mechanism, you can add a drawer that fits right under. This place becomes ideal to store cleaning materials for easy access.
While some prefer aesthetics by using walls for display shelves, we recommend installing upper cabinets instead. Having cabinets above your counter adds a huge amount of storage while remaining easy to use. Just make sure to choose cabinet mechanisms that enable you to easily reach up top.
Pots and pans can be difficult to store due to their long handles and large surfaces. One great way to store them is through tall drawers with vertical organizers inside. If you can get a mechanism that can hold a tall front plus the heavy load of pots and pans, this will make your kitchen life much easier as you won’t need to dig deep for them.
Most kitchen counters measure around 60cm deep. If you have enough room, you might consider adding another 10cm to its depth. This gives you a huge boost in usable space as you can use your counter’s rear area as quick-access storage for frequently used items like salt, sugar, or flour.
Cabinet doors looks simple. On the surface, they just look like painted wooden panels. But they’re not that simple.
Contrary to popular belief, most cabinet doors aren’t made of wood. They’re usually synthetic boards made of varying materials like pulp, wood sheets, or plastic. On their own, these boards aren’t presentable. But they’re affordable, easy to cut, and more sustainable than wood. So for most cabinets, kitchen suppliers end up just wrapping these boards with different finishes to create beautiful cabinets.
The most popular cabinet finishes and materials:
Aside from your cabinet doors, you’ll need to select your countertop.
Since this is where you’ll do a lot of kitchen work, you’ll need something that’s waterproof, heatproof, scratch-proof, and impact-resistant.
The most popular countertop materials:
How about tiles for countertops? You can use tiles, but since they’re installed one by one, you might end up with an uneven surface. This will make tasks like chopping more difficult and annoying. Go for tiles only if you’re on a really tight budget.
How about stainless steel? Stainless works great for restaurants due to their thinness, flexibility, and durability. But at home, we don’t recommend them for a few reasons. First, it can get really cold or hot depending on the weather. Second, if you drop something heavy on it, you can leave it with a gigantic ding. You can’t fix that ding. Last, it’s prone to scratching so you’ll need to do maintenance on it in case it does.
Your cabinets and countertops are the two most important materials you’ll be selecting. But you’ll need to choose a few more.
Since there are too many options to cover, we’ll just go through each one briefly:
So you know what kitchen you want, what layout you’re going for, what kind of budget you have. You just need someone to build your dream kitchen.
As we’ve said before, we really don’t recommend letting non-kitchen contractors build your kitchen. Most of them will tell you they can. Don’t do it—everyone who does it regrets it. We discuss contractor versus modular kitchens here.
Once you’ve picked your supplier, ask them a few things:
Once you’ve done all of these, you can only really trust your chosen supplier. So choose right. We compiled a list of the top 10 modular kitchen suppliers in the Philippines.
It’s never easy building your own kitchen. Even harder if it’s your first time.
But hopefully by now you have a good idea of how to move forward:
With this, you should be pretty much set. It still won’t be an easy path given how so many things can go wrong, but if they don’t go as planned, you know what to do.
Good luck in your kitchen journey! Have fun and we’re so excited for you!
Thank you to Oppein Manila for making this helpful article happen. Check them out on Facebook and Instagram—they make some of the best kitchens in Manila at unbeatable prices.
