Kitchen cabinets and fitted kitchen design in Nairobi

Kitchens are the highest-ticket joinery in most houses and, honestly, not the highest margin, because a large part of what you pay goes straight through us to somebody else. Worktops, appliances, sinks and taps are bought in. That is worth knowing when you compare a kitchen quotation with a wardrobe one.

What it costs

Kenyan kitchens are priced per running foot: the horizontal length of the run, with floor and wall units counted together. A three-metre wall with cupboards above and below is about ten running feet, not twenty.

Expect KES 12,000 to 28,000 and above per running foot depending on the carcass material and the hardware. An apartment kitchen is typically 10 to 14 running feet; a family house kitchen is 18 to 26. A mid-specification family kitchen therefore lands around KES 500,000 to 1.2 million all in.

Market ranges reviewed September 2026, not quotations.

Where the money should go

Counter-intuitively, not into the doors.

The carcass is what fails. Marine plywood under the sink without argument, because water there is a certainty rather than a risk. Blockboard or marine ply for the rest of the boxes. Standard MDF anywhere it can get repeatedly wet swells irreversibly, and the swelling starts at the cut edges and the screw holes.

The hardware is what you notice. Hinges and drawer runners are rated in cycles, and they are completely invisible on installation day. Cheap hinges on a kitchen opened three times a day begin to sag inside two years, and replacing them once everything is fitted is tedious work you pay for twice.

The fronts are what you see, and they are the easiest thing to change later. MDF takes a sprayed or wrapped finish better than anything else because it has no grain and stays flat.

There is a full comparison of the boards on the materials page.

Islands, and whether your room can take one

An island needs 900mm of clear space all round, and 1,000 to 1,200mm on any side where an appliance door opens or two people pass. In practice that means a room about 4.2 metres wide before an island stops being an obstacle.

Below that, a peninsula gives you most of the benefit and needs clearance on three sides rather than four. We will measure and say so before you have paid for a design, because an island that makes a kitchen worse is an expensive way to learn this.

At Runda and Karen scale the island is frequently the largest single carcass in the house and bigger than any doorway, so it gets built as two sections joined on site with the joint under the worktop line. Planned, nobody ever sees it.

Worktops

We template and coordinate worktops in granite, quartz or terrazzo, and they are quoted separately from the joinery so you can see which is which.

Templating happens after the units are set and levelled, never before. A worktop measured from a drawing or from unlevelled units will not sit right, and stone is not adjustable. Anyone offering to template beforehand is guessing, and the guess is not theirs to live with.

The staff kitchen

Most Karen, Runda and Muthaiga houses have one, and it is consistently squeezed at the end of a budget. It wants hardwearing surfaces, simple robust hardware and easy-clean detail, which is a different brief from a scaled-down main kitchen. Pricing it separately from the start stops it becoming the thing that gets cut.