What's the cost of a handmade kitchen in 2025?

That is a very difficult question to answer! Mainly because no two kitchens are the same, and it's even more difficult when it is a handmade one because the cabinets are made to measure, so they're not standardised and we cannot even have a price per unit. All that being said I am going to do my best to give you not only an idea what you should expect to pay for a bespoke kitchen, but also explain what goes into calculating the price.

The first thing is obviously the size of the room. The bigger it is the more the kitchen is going to cost, but that's not different than modular kitchen. Where the difference start to show is with the materials. On a handmade kitchen you have a lot more options to choose from in terms of materials. We often incorporate real wood for the doors/drawers and frames, I personally prefer to make carcasses from plywood as it's stronger and more eco friendly than melamine. Generally speaking, and I know I am very biased but I would say handmade kitchens are made with better materials which unfortunately cost more money, and that is reflected in the final cost.

Carcass made from melamine, drawers, faces, and frames made from English oak.

Next is the design. Depending on the storage requirements a kitchen could be more, or less expensive. If that sounds confusing, don't worry, I'm about to explain it in more detail! A cabinet with two doors is cheaper to manufacture that one with two drawers, and a cabinet with two drawers is cheaper than one with three. It all comes down to how labour intensive a process is. Drawers are a great example. A drawer made with hand cut dovetail joints is more expensive than a drawer constructed with hidden pocket holes, because it takes twice as long to build.

A drawer with a hand cut half blind dovetail

A drawer constructed with hidden pocket holes

Then we come to appliances and worktops, The cost of those is directly linked to the customer's decisions. We don't make money on those, we work with whatever you choose. In my opinion this is one of the benefits of a bespoke kitchen, you can go and pick the appliances yourself and possibly even save some money if you can find good deals. I am not going to try and sell you £1000 extractor fan.

Let's get to the point, the numbers! As you can see from the chart below a bespoke kitchen can cost anything between £15 000 to £45 000 depending on the size. For most homeowners I say £20 000 to £25 000 would be a reasonable expectation, as this would cover the average sized kitchen in Sussex, Hampshire, and Surrey!

Please be aware that £45 000 is not your top limit, you can in fact spend a hell of a lot more. The most expensive kitchen I have ever worked on costed £85 000, £35 000 of which were the stone worktops alone. Keep in mind that those are one of a kind projects usually for people for whom money is not a factor. As such I like to exclude them, because they're more than capable of making the average cost seem a lot more expensive than it is! Yes the bespoke handmade kitchen is pricier, but not by much and I think that needs to be pointed out.