Kitchen extension ideas that work in Irish homes

27 August 2026 · The Home Upgrade Co.

An extension gives you something most Irish kitchens never had: enough floor to plan properly. That freedom is also the trap. A big empty rectangle makes it easy to spread everything out and end up walking further to make a cup of tea than you did in the old galley. These are the ideas that hold up once the room is real and people are living in it.

What layout works best in a kitchen extension?

The layouts that work keep the cooking, washing and cold storage close together and let everything else spread out. That triangle stays tight no matter how much floor you gain.

Most Irish kitchen extensions land on one of three shapes. Which one suits you depends less on taste than on where the new walls meet the old ones, and where the light comes from.

Layout	Suits	Watch out for
Galley along one wall, table beyond	Narrow extensions and side returns	Storage runs out fast, plan tall units at one end
L shape into the corner	Square rooms, corner glazing	The corner is dead space unless it is a proper pull-out
Run plus island	Wide rooms, open plan to living space	Needs real width, see the island section below

Where should the island go?

Usually on the line where the old back wall stood, anchoring the kitchen to the original room rather than floating in the middle of the new floor. Allow about a metre of clear walkway on every side you actually use.

The common mistake is treating the island as furniture and centring it in the room. It is a working surface, and it wants to sit within reach of the sink and hob, not across a walkway from them. If the room is not wide enough for a metre of clearance on both working sides, a peninsula off the run does the same job without the pinch points. There is more on this on our kitchen islands page.

How do you get light to the back of the room?

Glazing at the new end lights the new end. The half of the room that used to be the old kitchen is the part that goes dark, and it is usually where the units are.

Rooflights over the original footprint are what fix that, not bigger doors at the garden end. It is worth walking the plan with your architect asking specifically where the light lands at four in the afternoon in November, because a room that photographs beautifully in June can be gloomy at the counter for half the year. Wall units, door finish and worktop colour all change how much of that light gets bounced back into the room.

What about the utility room?

If the extension can spare three square metres for a utility, take it. Moving the washing machine, the drier and the recycling out of the kitchen is the biggest quality-of-life gain available in an open plan room.

The reason is noise. Open plan means a spin cycle competes with the television. A utility does not need a window or much width, it needs a door, plumbing on the same wall run, and somewhere for the boiler and the coats. Plan it at drawing stage, because carving it out later means moving services that are already in.

How should the new space meet the old room?

Decide early whether the join is meant to disappear or to read as two spaces. Both work. Pretending the question does not exist is what leaves an awkward step, a stray radiator or a ceiling line that never resolves.

Flooring is the usual giveaway. Running one floor through the whole space reads as a single room and needs the levels to match. Changing material at the threshold reads as two, which is fine when it looks deliberate. The same goes for ceiling height and any downstand beam where the old wall came out: designed in, it frames the kitchen, ignored, it looks like something went wrong.

When should the kitchen be designed?

At drawing stage, before the build starts. Designing the kitchen early means the plumbing, waste and electrics go in the right place the first time, and the kitchen is ready to fit the day the room is.

This is the part people get wrong most often, and it costs real money. The builder needs to know where the sink, hob, extractor, dishwasher, fridge and every socket land before the floor goes down and the walls close up. If the kitchen design happens after the extension is finished, either the layout bends around services that are already in, or the services get moved. We design from your architect plans for exactly this reason, and we schedule the fit-out around your builder programme rather than the other way round.

To be clear about who does what: your builder does the structural work, and we design, supply and fit the kitchen inside it. Two teams, one sequence, agreed before anyone starts.

Do you need planning permission?

Often not. Since 27 July 2026 you can extend a house by up to 45 square metres without planning permission, up from the old 40, provided the other exempted development conditions are met.

The conditions matter as much as the floor area: there are limits on how much open space is left at the back, on height, and on windows overlooking neighbours, and a protected structure or a previous extension changes the arithmetic. The current rules are set out by Citizens Information on altering your house, and your architect or builder confirms it for your site. Worth knowing that a lot of extension advice still online quotes the old 40 square metre figure.

What decides the cost of the kitchen itself?

The kitchen in an extension is priced like any other kitchen: by the amount of cabinetry, the finishes, and how far the services have to move. The extension changes the room, not the way the kitchen is priced.

What does change is that you are specifying into a blank room rather than working around what is already there, so the layout decisions are genuinely free at drawing stage and expensive afterwards. We do not publish figures, because the honest answer depends on the room, the cabinetry and the finishes, and a number quoted without seeing those is a guess dressed up as a price. What we do instead is measure, design it in 3D, and give you one complete itemised quote you can compare against anyone else. The full breakdown of what moves a kitchen price is in our guide to what a new kitchen costs in Ireland.

Worth saying plainly: we are not the cheapest way to put units into an extension. The work is made to measure and fitted by our own team, and it is priced to that standard. If you have just spent months and a builder budget on the room, it is usually not the moment to put the cheapest possible kitchen into it.

How to start without committing to anything

Send us the architect plans, even at draft stage. Our design visit is free: we call out anywhere in Dublin, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow, take the measurements from the drawings and the site, and our designers create full 3D plans of your new kitchen inside the new room. You get the designs and a complete itemised quote, and you take your time with both. No cost, no obligation, and no chasing from us either way.