The best kitchen layout is the one that puts the sink, the cooktop, and the fridge within a few steps of each other and gives you counter space beside each one. Galley, L, U, and island are the four ways of doing that, and they differ mostly in how much cabinetry they need and how much room they take. A galley uses the least cabinetry, a U with an island uses the most, and the cost follows the cabinetry.
The work triangle is the old rule: sink, cooktop, and fridge form a triangle, each side between about four and nine feet, with nothing cutting through it. It still holds. The rule people miss is landing zones, the counter you set things down on. A kitchen that fails on landing zones feels cramped no matter how big it is.
A galley is two parallel runs with an aisle between them. It is the most efficient layout for cooking because everything is one turn away, and it is the most common layout in Vancouver condos and in the original kitchens of older houses. Cost is the lowest of the four because there are no corners to solve and the least linear footage of cabinetry. Its weakness is traffic: if the galley is also the route to the back door, people walk through the work zone. A galley in a condo usually lands in the small band, about $18,000 to $28,000 as a whole-project planning range.
An L runs along two adjoining walls and leaves the rest of the room open. It suits open-plan condos and smaller houses because the third side can be a dining table or a small island later. It costs a little more than a galley of the same length because the corner needs a solution: a corner pull-out, a lazy susan, or a blind corner with a swing-out. Our advice is to spend on the corner rather than leave it dead.
A U runs along three walls, so it has two corners and the most counter and storage of any layout without an island. It suits houses with a kitchen room of their own, and it is a poor fit for a narrow room, because a U with an aisle under 42 inches feels like a corridor. It is the most cabinetry per square foot of any layout, so it costs the most in the same finish, and both corners need a solution. A U in a house is typically medium-band work, $30,000 to $50,000 as a whole-project planning range, depending on finish and how much of it goes into drawers.
An island is not a layout on its own. It is a galley, L, or U with a block in the middle, and it needs about 42 inches of clearance on every side, which means a room with cabinets on both sides needs to be about 13 feet across before an island fits, more if the island is deep. An island adds cabinetry on two faces, a counter slab, and often a sink or cooktop, which brings plumbing and electrical into the floor, work done by your contractor's trades and coordinated with our install. When the room is too narrow for an island, a peninsula, one end attached to a run, gives you most of the seating for less cabinetry.
In a Vancouver condo the plumbing stack and the shear walls are fixed, so the sink and usually the cooktop stay where they are, and the choice is between a galley and an L, with a peninsula if there is room. In a house the plumbing can move, walls can come down with an engineer's sign-off, and the choice opens up to a U or an island. Either way, decide the layout on function first, then choose the door style and finish. A well-placed galley in painted slab MDF with integrated handles works harder than a badly placed island in rift white oak.
Sketch your room, then put its size and finish tier into the Vancouver Kitchen Cost Calculator for a planning range. Our post on what drives the cost of a kitchen up or down explains why the layout is one of the levers, and how much a custom kitchen costs in Vancouver gives the full range. When you have a plan in mind, book a free consultation and we will draw it properly.