Kitchen Layout Ideas: 6 Floor Plans and What Fits 13.4m²

Most kitchen layout ideas are photographed in rooms far larger than yours. That is the whole problem. A U-shaped kitchen with a 1.2 metre island looks obvious in a picture and is physically impossible in the average British kitchen, and you will only find that out after somebody has measured up and quietly steered you towards something else.

So this starts with the size of the room you probably have, then works through the six layouts that exist, what each one actually needs in metres, and the two building regulations that decide whether the plan in your head is buildable.

The room you are almost certainly working with

The average kitchen in a British home is 13.44m². That comes from LABC Warranty’s analysis of 10,000 houses listed on Rightmove and Zoopla, broken down by the decade the house was built.

The more interesting number is the trend. British kitchens peaked in the 1960s at 15.37m² and have been shrinking since. A 1930s kitchen averaged 12.27m², a 1960s one 15.37m², and one built since 2010 is back down to 13.44m². Nearly two square metres have gone from the middle of the century to now, which is roughly one full run of base units.

Before any layout, take three measurements: wall-to-wall in both directions, the position and swing of every door, and the position of the window, the soil stack and the existing gas and water. Those four fixed things decide more about your layout than taste does.

The two clearances everything hangs on

A walkway of 1200mm. Approved Document M Volume 1 requires “a minimum 1200mm clear space in front of and between all kitchen units and appliances” in accessible and adaptable dwellings built to M4(2), and 1500mm for wheelchair-user dwellings under M4(3). You can read the wording in Approved Document M on gov.uk. If you are refitting an existing kitchen those requirements do not bind you, but 1200mm is the number that makes a kitchen comfortable, and it is not an accident that it is also the regulated one. You can live with 1000mm. Below about 900mm you cannot open a dishwasher and pass behind it.

Remember what eats the gap: a dishwasher door drops about 500mm into the walkway, an oven door 500 to 550mm, and a full-height fridge door on the wrong hinge can block a doorway outright.

Extraction, which decides where the hob goes. Approved Document F Volume 1, 2026 edition, sets minimum intermittent extract rates for a kitchen in Table 1.1. It is 30 litres per second if a cooker hood extracts to the outside, and 60 litres per second if there is no hood or the hood does not extract outside, with a note that the hood should span at least the full width of the cooker. The document is explicit on the point everybody trips over: “a recirculating cooker hood on its own does not provide a means of ventilation that complies with Part F”. You can see it in Approved Document F on gov.uk.

In plain terms: putting the hob on an island in the middle of a room means either ducting through the floor or the ceiling, or accepting a recirculating hood plus 60 l/s of extraction somewhere else in the room. Our cooker hood buying guide goes into what that means for the hood itself.

The six layouts

1. Single run, or one-wall

Everything on one wall. Sink, hob and fridge in a line, wall units above, no return.

Works in a room narrower than about 2.4m, in open-plan spaces where the kitchen is a wall rather than a room, and in flats. Needs roughly 3m of wall to fit a sink, a 600mm appliance space and enough worktop to work on. Below 2.4m of run you are choosing between a dishwasher and usable worktop.

The weakness is that everything happens in one line, so two people cannot both work. The fix is tall units at one end to claw back storage that a second run would have given you, which is what tall kitchen units are for.

2. Galley

Two parallel runs facing each other. The most efficient layout per square metre, and the one that suits a lot of British terraces because so many of them have a long narrow back kitchen.

The number that matters is the gap between the runs. With 600mm base units on both sides, a 3m wide room gives you 1800mm of walkway, which is generous. A 2.4m room gives you 1200mm, which is right. A 2.2m room gives you 1000mm, which works if you keep opposing appliance doors from facing each other. Anything under 2.1m and you should drop one side to a shallower run or go single-wall.

Put the hob and sink on the same side if you can, and the fridge and tall storage opposite. Cooking across a walkway with a pan in your hand is how a galley kitchen turns unpleasant.

3. L-shaped

Two runs meeting in a corner. This is the default British kitchen for good reason: it fits a squarish room, it leaves two walls free for a door, a window and a table, and it gives you a natural work sequence around the corner.

An L-shape wants at least 2.4m on the short leg. The whole design question is the corner, because a right-angle corner in base units creates a metre of dead space you cannot reach. The answer is a corner carousel, a magic corner pull-out, or a diagonal unit, all covered in our kitchen corner units guide. Ignore it and you have paid for storage you will use twice a year.

A kitchen in L shape is also the layout that most easily grows into an island later, because the two free walls give you somewhere to put a table now and a peninsula when the budget recovers.

4. U-shaped

Three runs. Maximum storage and worktop for the footprint, and the layout that makes a range cooker look best, because the cooker sits centred in a run with a full wall of units either side.

A U-shaped kitchen needs about 3m by 3m as an absolute minimum, and it is more demanding than that number suggests. With units on three walls, a 3m room leaves 1800mm across the middle, which sounds fine until you notice that you have two internal corners to solve rather than one, and that the only place left for a door is the fourth wall.

It also becomes claustrophobic in a room with a single small window. If you are set on a U and the room is under 3.2m wide, drop the wall units on one leg and use open shelving or nothing at all.

5. Peninsula, or G-shape

A U-shape with a short fourth run projecting into the room, attached at one end. A kitchen peninsula is the layout most people should be looking at when they want an island and do not have the floor for one, and it is badly under-represented in kitchen decor design ideas because it photographs less well.

The advantages over an island are real. It needs a walkway on three sides instead of four, so it fits a room roughly a metre narrower. Running services into it is far cheaper, because the pipework and cable come along the wall it is attached to rather than under the floor slab. And it gives you the same thing people actually want from an island, which is a breakfast bar and a barrier between the cooking and everyone else.

Allow 1200mm between the peninsula and the run opposite, and about 900mm of overhang if you want stools under it. Our kitchen breakfast bar ideas covers the seating side.

6. Island

A free-standing block with clearance on all four sides.

Here is the honest arithmetic. A modest island is 1000mm deep. Add 1000mm of walkway on both sides and 600mm base units on both walls, and you need 4.2m of room width before the island exists in a usable way. Take the regulated 1200mm walkway instead and it is 4.6m. In a 13.44m² kitchen, that means a room of roughly 4.6m by 2.9m, at which point the length is too short for the island to be worth having.

This is why so many island kitchens are in extensions. If your room is under about 4m wide, a peninsula will give you most of what you want. If it is over 4.5m, read kitchen island ideas properly first, and settle the hob and extraction question before anything else, because that decision drives the ceiling, the floor and the budget.

The work triangle, and what has replaced it

The old rule says the sink, hob and fridge should form a triangle with sides between roughly 1.2m and 2.7m and a total perimeter under about 8m. It is a useful sanity check and it still catches genuinely bad plans, like a fridge stranded across a walkway from everything else.

What it misses is that a modern kitchen has more than three points. Designers now think in zones: a store zone at the fridge and larder, a prep zone with the biggest clear run of worktop, a cook zone at the hob and oven, and a clean zone at the sink and dishwasher. Arrange those four in that order, in a line or around a corner, and the triangle looks after itself.

Two practical rules that come out of the zone approach and that the triangle never captured. Leave your longest uninterrupted stretch of worktop, ideally 900mm or more, on the side of the hob you will actually put pans down on. And keep the dishwasher within reach of the sink and directly beneath or beside the crockery cupboard, because the load-and-unload journey is the one you make most often.

Fitting the layout to the units

Once the layout is chosen, everything else is arithmetic. British base units come in standard widths of 300, 400, 500, 600, 800 and 1000mm, sit 600mm deep, and finish at about 900mm high with the worktop on. Wall units are usually 300 to 330mm deep. Ovens, dishwashers and washing machines all want a 600mm space.

A range cooker breaks that grid on purpose, at 900mm, 1000mm or 1100mm wide, and it needs to be planned first rather than squeezed in afterwards, along with the run of worktop either side of it. Start with our range cooker buying guide and what size range cooker do I need, then fill the rest of the wall around it.

Draw the units to scale before you commit. Add up the widths, compare them to the wall, and you will usually find you are 150mm out somewhere, which is a filler panel rather than a crisis if you find it on paper. Our kitchen cabinet sizes guide has the full dimension set, and the kitchen worktop calculator will price the surface once the runs are settled.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best kitchen layout for a small UK kitchen? For a room under about 2.4m wide, a single run or a galley. For a squarish room of around 3m by 3m, an L-shape, which leaves two walls free for a door, a window and a small table. A U-shape is possible at 3m by 3m but leaves you with two dead corners and only one wall for the door, so it suits a room you enter from a hall rather than one you pass through.

How much space do you need between kitchen units? Approved Document M sets 1200mm of clear space in front of and between units for accessible and adaptable new dwellings, and 1500mm for wheelchair-user dwellings. In a refit those figures do not legally bind you, but 1200mm is the comfortable target, 1000mm is workable, and below 900mm you cannot open a dishwasher and get past it.

Can I put the hob on a kitchen island? Yes, but the extraction decides the cost. Approved Document F requires 30 litres per second from a cooker hood that extracts to the outside and 60 litres per second where there is no hood or the hood recirculates, and it states plainly that a recirculating hood on its own does not comply with Part F. Ducting an island hood means routing through the floor or the ceiling, which is a structural and budget question rather than a styling one.

How wide does a kitchen need to be for an island? About 4.2m as a hard floor, using a 1000mm island, 1000mm walkways either side and 600mm base units against both walls. At the 1200mm walkway that Approved Document M uses, it becomes about 4.6m. Under 4m, fit a peninsula instead: it needs clearance on three sides rather than four and the services run along the wall it is attached to.

What is the difference between a peninsula and an island? A peninsula is attached to a wall or a run of units at one end, an island is free-standing. That single difference means a peninsula needs a walkway on three sides instead of four, fits a room roughly a metre narrower, and is far cheaper to plumb and wire because the services follow the wall rather than going under the floor.

Is the kitchen work triangle still relevant? As a check, yes. If your sink, hob and fridge form a triangle with sides between about 1.2m and 2.7m, nothing is stranded. As a design method it has been overtaken by zoning, because a modern kitchen has a dishwasher, a microwave, a coffee machine and often two ovens, none of which the triangle accounts for. Plan store, prep, cook and clean in sequence and the triangle takes care of itself.

Where should the sink go? Under the window if there is one, which is convention rather than rule but a good one, and it keeps the window wall free of tall units that would block the light. The two real constraints are the position of the existing waste and soil stack, because moving a kitchen waste run is one of the more expensive small jobs in a refit, and keeping the sink within a step or two of the dishwasher.

How much does a new kitchen layout cost to change? Changing the layout costs far more than changing the units, because moving the sink means new waste runs, moving the hob means gas or a new circuit, and moving either means the extraction has to be reworked to Part F. Keeping the services where they are and changing everything else is the single biggest saving available. We break the numbers down in our kitchen renovation cost guide.