A contemporary coastal kitchen in a renovated Mount Maunganui home.

This contemporary coastal kitchen sits in a renovated Mount Maunganui home that already had plenty of character: oak timber-look floors, white walls, and a white ceiling with exposed beams and slatted timber overhead. If you want a clean, contemporary kitchen but worry it will read cold or clinical, this project shows how the home's own texture, and a careful balance of light and dark, keeps a contemporary kitchen warm and coastal.

The tall cabinetry and the overhead cupboards are a dark timber-look, which gives the kitchen depth and grounds it in the room. On its own, that much dark can feel heavy, so the base cabinetry and the bar back panel are white melamine, to lift it and keep the space light.

The contrast is the point. The dark gives the kitchen its weight and the white keeps it airy, and the two hold each other in balance rather than one taking over. It is what lets a largely white kitchen still feel considered, and a largely dark one still feel open.

The character that grounds this kitchen is overhead. The exposed beams and slatted timber ceiling were kept from the original home and painted out white, so the structure that gives the room its warmth and texture stays, but light.

Everything else was brought in to work with it. The walls were painted white and the oak timber-look flooring laid in after the kitchen, both coordinated around the cabinetry so the finished room reads as one considered whole rather than a kitchen dropped into a space. The clean contemporary lines sit easily under the old beams, relaxed and coastal rather than clinical, because the ceiling holds the character while the fresh white and warm timber keep it light. Designing and sequencing the whole room, not just the kitchen, is what keeps it from feeling like it landed from a showroom.

A few considered choices carry the kitchen. The benchtop is engineered stone with a subtle, muted vein, and that is a deliberate choice. A bold, marbled vein looks striking, but it also shows every join where one slab meets the next, particularly around the corners. A muted vein does the opposite: at the joins it fades and blends into the next slab, so the run reads calm and continuous rather than broken by an obvious seam.

The splashback is black mirror glass, which reflects the light, the window and the greenery back into the room, adding depth without pattern. And the handles are Archant Edge straight pulls in an inox look, top mounted, a fine metal line that keeps the cabinetry crisp. None of these shout, and together they give the kitchen its quiet, contemporary polish.

Contemporary kitchens live or die by what you do not see. Behind a sliding door sits a hidden pantry that holds the microwave, the toaster and the kettle, so the everyday appliances are out of sight and the full length of the bench stays clear and usable.

The slider is the key to it. The whole pantry opens up when you need it and closes away when you do not, so the clean line of the kitchen stays unbroken while the everyday clutter still has a proper home. It is the kind of storage that makes a minimal kitchen actually liveable.

The client loves plants, and it shows throughout the space. Greenery is threaded right through the kitchen, trailing from the shelves and around the window, softening the hard lines and bringing life and colour into a palette that is otherwise white, dark and stone.

It does more than decorate. The planting warms the contemporary look, ties the kitchen to the coastal green outside the window, and makes the room feel lived in rather than staged. A kitchen designed with room for a client's plants, and lit and laid out so they thrive, is a small example of designing to the person, not just the space.

The contemporary coastal look does not stop at the kitchen. The same palette and materials, the oak floors, the white, the clean lines, carry through the connected living spaces, so the kitchen belongs to the whole house rather than standing apart from it.

That is why this style suits this home. The house is light, open and coastal, and the kitchen simply continues that in a contemporary language, rather than sitting in it as a different idea. Designing the kitchen to the home it opens into, not as a room on its own, is what makes a style feel resolved rather than applied.

So what makes this both contemporary and coastal, when the two can pull in different directions. The contemporary sits in the details and the form: the fine, top-mounted straight handles, the strong horizontal line of the long bench and peninsula, the pared palette, and the quiet stone and black mirror surfaces. Everything is kept minimal and level, nothing busy. The coastal sits in the light, the warm oak, the white, and the greenery threaded through, all of which keep those clean lines relaxed rather than hard.

Held together, they become one thing. A contemporary kitchen on its own can read cold, and a coastal one can read casual. Balancing the two gives you a kitchen that is calm and current but still warm and easy to live in by the water, which is exactly what a Mount Maunganui home wants.

If you are renovating a home in Mount Maunganui and want a contemporary kitchen that still feels warm and coastal, this is the kind of project we take on. You can see how these kitchens are designed on the services page, and when you are ready, begin a design conversation.