A copper farmhouse kitchen for a century-old home in Morrinsville.

This copper farmhouse kitchen in Morrinsville, in the heart of the Waikato, began as a full remodel of an original homestead kitchen, at least seventy years old and never properly reworked. If you have an older or rural home you love but a kitchen that no longer works the way you live, this is the kind of project that brings it up to date without stripping out its character.

We kept what gave the house its warmth, the timber ceiling and the timber window surrounds, and designed a crisp, modern kitchen around them, with copper as the thread that ties the old and the new together.

The kitchen was the homestead's original, at least seventy years old, and had never been properly reworked. The task was not to erase that history but to work with it.

We kept the timber sarked ceiling and the timber architraves that give the room its country warmth, re-lined the walls, laid new flooring detail and redesigned the cabinetry from the ground up, so the kitchen feels current while the house still feels like itself. The result is a modern farmhouse kitchen that belongs to the home it sits in, rather than one laid over the top of it.

Copper is an old farmhouse material, and here it does the work that ties the whole scheme together. The handcrafted hammered copper rangehood is the piece your eye goes to first, with a copper butler's sink and a gooseneck copper tap below it, and slim copper handles on the pantries picking up the same note.

Against crisp white cabinetry, a warm metal keeps the room from reading cold and gives it personality and a sense of heritage, without tipping into a theme. It is the detail that makes this kitchen feel like a considered whole, rather than a white box with fittings added.

To let the copper take centre stage, the rest of the kitchen is kept calm. The cabinetry is largely handleless, with push-to-open drawers and doors, so nothing competes with the copper.

A white engineered stone benchtop and a white textured porcelain splashback add softness and depth without noise, and sit easily against the home's timber floors, timber ceiling and window surrounds. New stainless appliances carry the metal thread through in a hard-wearing, everyday way. Every surface was chosen so the copper reads as the one clear statement, and everything else supports it.

This is a compact kitchen, so the storage had to work hard and stay out of sight. Two on-bench pantries were built with bifold doors and timber-look shelving, lit with concealed LED strip lighting so you can see what is in them, and they close away to keep the clean line of the room.

The blind corner, the space most kitchens waste, is fitted with an Enko Flybox pull-out that brings the back of the corner out to you, and push-to-open doors and drawers keep the whole kitchen handle-free. It stores like a larger kitchen while still feeling light and uncluttered, which is exactly what a small kitchen needs.

So what makes this a modern farmhouse kitchen, rather than just a white kitchen in the country. It is the way the old and the new are held together. A rural Waikato home wants warmth, materials that wear well on a working property, and a connection to the land around it.

The timber the house already had, the copper that has always belonged in a farmhouse, and the calm white that keeps it current do exactly that. It is welcoming and light-filled, and it feels as though it has always been part of the home, which is the point of designing to the house rather than to a catalogue. Considered kitchens, designed to live beautifully.

The usual instinct is to knock the kitchen through into the dining room and open it right up. Here that was not the right move. The window layout left only one wall able to carry the tall appliances and storage, so opening the room out would have taken away the very wall the kitchen needed to work.

Keeping it closed also protected the budget. Moving plumbing, gas and electrical is one of the quickest ways a kitchen renovation runs over, so we design around the services already in place wherever we can and keep the spend where it shows. It suits the house as well: a homestead of this age was built as a set of defined rooms, not one open space, so keeping the kitchen its own room holds the home in its era rather than stripping out its character.

If you have an older home in Morrinsville or across the Waikato and you are thinking about a kitchen that respects it, this is the kind of work we take on. You can see how these kitchens are designed on the services page, and when you are ready, begin a design conversation.