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The laundry is the room that gets designed last, with whatever space is left over, which is why so many Australian homes end up with a washer, a dryer and nowhere to fold anything.
Browse the galleries and you get styled photos. What you rarely get is the number that decides everything: how much wall you have. Every laundry design idea below is really a question about linear metres.
What the rules actually require
Less than most people assume, and the difference between a house and an apartment is significant.
For a house, the NCC requires “at least one washtub and space in the same room for a washing machine.” That is it, no clothesline, no dryer, no bench.
For an apartment, you also need a clothes line or hoist with not less than 7.5 metres of line, or space for a heat-operated drying appliance. That 7.5m figure gets quoted at Australian homeowners constantly; it does not apply to houses.
One rule catches people mid-renovation: a kitchen sink cannot be counted as the laundry washtub. Plan a European laundry into a kitchen wall and you still need a tub.
Three more worth knowing before you draw anything:
- Ventilation. A laundry needs 40 litres per second of mechanical exhaust the same as a kitchen, not the bathroom’s 25, discharged to outdoor air, not the roof space. Or natural ventilation with an openable area of 5% of the floor.
- Waterproofing. A laundry is a wet area, but the standard is water resistant, not waterproof. Walls need water resistance to at least 150mm above the tub where it sits within 75mm of the wall.
- Floor waste. Not required in a house. Required in an apartment sitting above another unit, and South Australia varies the rule again.
The five layouts
| Layout | What it needs | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Single-wall | 1.8m x 1.8m minimum room; 2.4–3m of wall for tub, machine and bench | Townhouses, small renovations |
| Galley | Two runs, 900mm aisle absolute minimum, 1000–1200mm to actually work in | Long narrow rooms off a hallway |
| L-shaped | Two adjacent walls; the corner does the folding | The most common Australian laundry room |
| Bathroom-laundry combo | ~5.5m² with a shower, 4m² without; at least 2500mm wide | Apartments, second bathrooms, older cottages |
| Laundry-mudroom | Add roughly 1m x 1.5m for hooks, seat and shoes | Houses with a back door onto the yard |
Common laundry layouts include single-wall, galley, L-shaped, and combined bathroom-laundry, and the room usually chooses for you. A galley below 900mm is not a layout, it is a corridor with appliances in it.
On the mudroom
The laundry-mudroom combination includes storage solutions and facilitates indoor-outdoor flow, and it is genuinely current in Australian project homes. But “mudroom” is a North American term, Better Homes & Gardens Australia says so itself, and the Australian trade word is drop zone. It earns its space in a house where the back door, the clothesline and the dog all arrive in the same spot.
Bench space is where laundries fail
Extra bench space is crucial for folding and sorting laundry, and this is the single most common regret.
The number that matters is depth. A laundry benchtop should be 650mm deep, not the 600mm kitchen standard, three separate Australian designers give that figure, because the bench has to clear a front-loader plus its hoses. Sydney designer Kerrie Richardson puts it bluntly: the biggest mistake she sees is benchtops that are too narrow.
The rest of the dimensions:
- Bench height 900mm, same as a kitchen.
- Australian front-loaders are 595–600mm wide; allow a 610–620mm cabinet opening.
- 1000mm clear in front of the machines, 1200mm to be comfortable – a front-loader door needs to swing and you need to stand behind it.
- Side by side, allow 1600mm of wall for a washer and dryer.
- Vertical appliance stacking is a common space-saving method in laundry design: stackable appliances save space in small laundry areas, and a stacked recess needs 600 x 600mm plus about 50mm each side for ventilation and servicing.
Storage that earns its place
Australian laundry design focuses on maximising efficiency and smart storage, mostly because the room is small and the job generates clutter.
Overhead cabinets are standard 720mm high and 300mm deep, mounted 565–585mm above the bench. Maximising storage with pull-out hampers and overhead cabinets is essential in small laundries, keep the top shelf for things you use twice a year.
A tall cupboard is ideal for storing cleaning supplies and equipment, and tall cupboards are ideal for storing cleaning supplies precisely because cleaning products are tall, awkward and ugly. A 600mm broom cupboard takes a vacuum, a mop and the ironing board, the difference between a tidy laundry and a corner full of handles. Deep cupboards below the bench serve the bulk items.
Concealed pullout shelves enhance laundry organisation, and concealed pullout shelves maximise laundry storage efficiency because you see the back of the cupboard without kneeling. Drawers are effective for organising smaller laundry items, pegs, spare buttons, the sewing kit, and built-in storage helps utilise compact utility room spaces better than freestanding shelving ever does.
Pull-out hampers run $273–$640 in Australia depending on brand and capacity, one per person in a family is the realistic count, which is more space than most plans allow. Wicker baskets and laundry baskets on an open shelf work too and cost a fraction, with the honest caveat that open storage in a laundry collects lint and dust, and that a basket doubles as decor only while it is empty.
The hanging rail problem
Integrated drying racks and hanging rails help streamline wet clothes storage, but a hanging rail under an overhead cabinet does not. A shirt needs about 940mm of clear drop; a 900mm bench with overheads at 565–585mm clearance gives you roughly 550mm, which hangs a tea towel. Use a wall-mounted fold-down airer ($40–$195) or a ceiling airer, and put the rail where it can actually work.
Materials, and one fact that is out of date
You will still read that engineered stone may face bans due to health risks. It does not face bans, it has been prohibited nationally since 1 July 2024. Manufacture, supply, processing and installation of any engineered stone containing 1% or more crystalline silica by weight is banned; transitional arrangements ended 31 December 2024 and importation stopped 1 January 2025. Several Australian renovation sites are still running the old wording, and some still recommend “low-silica” product, SafeWork NSW is explicit that there is no scientific evidence lower-silica engineered stone is safer.
What is legal, and what suits a laundry
- Porcelain benchtops excel with heat and water resistance, the best-performing surface in the room, at $700–$2,000/m² installed.
- Laminates offer great value and moisture resistance at $250–$450 per linear metre. The honest failure mode is the edges: water sitting at a sink cut-out or an unsealed join will swell the substrate. Seal it and wipe it.
- Stainless steel at $1,200–$3,600 per linear metre is indestructible and shows every mark.
- Moisture-resistant cabinetry and durable flooring are crucial in Australian laundries – specify HMR board or marine ply for the carcases, and a P3–P4 rated floor. Porcelain tile runs $80–$200/m² installed, vinyl plank $40–$95. Australian laundries often feature moisture-resistant materials and smart layouts for the same reason: it is a small room that gets wet every week, and a surface that scratches or swells shows it fast.
A deep sink is essential for soaking clothing items, and depth is the spec that matters: 280–330mm of bowl depth for genuine soaking, against 220–250mm which only rinses. Stainless steel sinks are durable and withstand heavy use and a 45L unit with cabinet is about $386. Composite sinks in granite and quartz are highly durable at $330–$637. A farmhouse sink – a fireclay butler, runs $903–$3,720 and needs its own base cabinet, so decide it before the joinery is drawn. One planning note: an undermount cannot go beneath laminate, tile or timber.
Ventilation, and the plants question
Ventilation is crucial for a hygienic laundry environment, good ventilation prevents moisture buildup in laundry rooms, and ventilation systems are important in enclosed laundries to prevent moisture accumulation. Exhaust fans or windows are essential for proper ventilation, a fan interlocked with the light plus a run-on timer is the cheapest mould insurance in the house. Ventilation keeps laundry rooms fresh and clean; nothing else does.
You will also read that indoor plants can improve air quality in laundry rooms. They cannot, at any realistic scale. The best available meta-analysis puts a single plant’s clean-air delivery rate at about 0.023 cubic metres an hour, you would need between ten and a thousand plants per square metre of floor to match normal air exchange. In a 4m² laundry that is at least forty plants. Keep one because you like it, not because it is doing anything.
Colour, cost and getting it done
Laundry design trends emphasise stylish aesthetics along with functionality, and compact laundry designs often integrate with the overall interior styling rather than being treated as a service cupboard. Warm timber and earthy tones are trending in Australian laundry designs, the same shift happening in Australian kitchens, warm neutrals and timber in place of the cool grey of the last decade. A shaker kitchen profile carried into the laundry gives a country or Hamptons house some character; flat-panel suits a modern one, and both styles are worth a look before you commit. White walls and a white splashback still work, and a laundry is a low-risk room for decorating with different colours, because you are looking at four square metres. Lighting matters more than the colour does: one central batten leaves you folding in your own shadow, so put a strip under the overheads.
European laundries conceal washers and dryers behind cabinetry to save space, and if that is your situation the cupboard has its own set of rules, chiefly that most dryers are not permitted to run behind closed doors.
Costs, for an Australian laundry renovation in 2026: $3,000–$10,000 cosmetic, $8,000–$20,000 mid-range, $18,000–$45,000+ for full custom. Laundry joinery runs $800–$1,500 per linear metre. Moving a plumbing point is $400–$1,500, and more through a slab; a new GPO is $125–$175. Allow one to two weeks for a cosmetic refresh and three to five for a full renovation with waterproofing and tiling.
The cheapest good laundry is the one where the tub and the washer stay exactly where they are. Every metre you move the services is money that could have been bench.
Where to start
Measure the wall before you explore a single photo. Pick the layout that fits it. Create 650mm of bench depth and a metre of clear space in front of the machines, then spend what is left on storage.
Do that and the laundry stops being the room where chores pile up and becomes the one that quietly runs daily life in the house. It is the least glamorous project in a home renovation and, per dollar, close to the most useful, so it does deserve a bit more planning than it usually gets. Get it wrong from scratch and you will live with it for twenty years.
If you are getting quotes, ask a local cabinetmaker for the linear-metre rate rather than a total, and take photos of your existing plumbing points before you contact anyone. The best designers will ask for both anyway, and the right local pro will tell you what your wall can take before they tell you what it could look like. That order wall first, inspiration second, is the whole tip, and it is the difference between a complete laundry and a room where things happen to be stored. It is also how you get the best experience out of a small budget, because nothing here is expensive except redoing it.
