Kitchen Sinks: What’s Actually Worth the Upgrade
Nobody plans a kitchen around the sink. People plan around the island, the splashback, the colour of the joinery — and then, somewhere near the end of the process, a sink gets chosen in about four minutes because it was on the same page as the tap.
Which is a bit mad, when you think about how the room actually gets used. You will touch the kitchen sink more times a day than any other thing in that kitchen. Not the oven. Not the island. The sink, and the tap sitting over it.
So here is my honest breakdown of where the money goes further — what I’d upgrade without hesitating, what I’d leave alone, and the one measurement I check on every single kitchen before anything gets ordered.
Some links in this post are affiliate links — if you buy through them I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and you get a discount for using the link.
The sink is the busiest object in the room
Think about a normal weeknight. You fill the kettle, rinse vegetables, drain pasta, soak a roasting tray, scrub a chopping board, fill the dog’s bowl, rinse a wine glass. Every one of those happens at the sink, and every one of them is either easy or annoying depending on decisions made months earlier at a showroom.
That’s the lens I use. Not “is this sink beautiful” — most of them look fine — but “how many times a week will this shape make my life slightly worse?” A sink that can’t fit an oven tray flat is a sink that annoys you roughly three hundred times a year.
Worth it: one big bowl instead of a bowl and a half
This is the upgrade I recommend most often, and it usually costs nothing extra. One large bowl beats a bowl-and-a-half almost every time in a home with a dishwasher.
The little half bowl is a leftover from a time before dishwashers were standard. It was there for scraping and rinsing while the big side held the wash-up water. Now it mostly holds a sad sponge and a bottle of dish liquid, and it steals the width you need for the things that actually don’t fit anywhere else — oven trays, wire racks, grill plates, the shelves out of the fridge.
On Evergreen, a compact 3.9 × 2.9m kitchen in Clayton South done for around $25,000, we swapped in a single-bowl sink and moved the dishwasher closer to it. That one change freed up the cabinet space that ended up storing baking trays and chopping boards. The client bakes constantly — she needed a sink she could actually wash a tray in, and a bench she could actually work on.
If your sink space is small, I would totally pick a single bowl over a double or a bowl and a half.
Where I’d do the opposite: if you have no dishwasher, or you hand-wash a lot of delicate things, a double bowl earns its keep. Same if the sink is your only prep water source in a big kitchen with two cooks. Rules are for people who don’t cook.
Can’t decide which one? If you have enough space, go for a sink with a removable inner bowl—like the ADP Clovelly Universal 4 Piece Sink Set. It’s great for anyone with over 900mm of sink space who doesn’t want to commit to just one style.
ADP Clovelly Universal 4 Piece Sink Set
Worth it: undermount — if your benchtop can take one
An undermount sink sits below the benchtop, so there’s no lip. You wipe crumbs straight in. A drop-in (or inset) sink sits on top with a rim, and that rim collects a thin grey line of gunk that you will be scrubbing for the next fifteen years.
It’s a small daily difference, but it’s a daily difference, which is exactly the kind of thing worth paying for. The catch is the benchtop. Engineered stone and natural stone take an undermount easily. Many laminate tops don’t — the exposed edge of the substrate has to be sealed properly, and only some laminate products are rated for it. Ask your benchtop supplier before you fall in love with the idea, because this is a decision made at template stage, not afterwards.
If undermount isn’t an option, a flush-mount or a good-quality drop-in with a slim rim is a perfectly respectable answer.
Worth it: the tap, more than the sink
If I had to split a budget between the two, I’d put more of it into the tap. Sinks are largely a solved problem — a decent stainless steel bowl from a reputable brand will outlive your interest in the kitchen. Taps are where cheap shows up fast: a handle that loosens, a cartridge that gets stiff, a finish that clouds after a year of citrus and dish soap.
I’ve said before that I think about tapware as jewellery. It’s the one piece of metal you hold every day, and it’s the thing your eye lands on when the rest of the kitchen is quiet and pale. Spend on what you touch.
Phoenix Vivid Slimline Side Lever Sink Mixer 220mm Gooseneck-Brushed Nickel
I buy a lot of tapware through The Blue Space, which is where most of my clients’ kitchen and bathroom fittings come from. Anyone shopping through my link gets a discount — the amount varies by product, so it’s worth going through the link rather than straight to their site. [ Blue Space product link needed: Phoenix Vivid Slimline side lever sink mixer 220mm gooseneck, brushed nickel ]
Pull-out spray or fixed gooseneck?
A pull-out spray is more useful than it looks. Rinsing a deep pot, cleaning the bowl itself, filling a vase that won’t fit under the spout — all easier. The trade-off is that the hose and the docking mechanism are the parts most likely to need attention in ten years, so buy a brand whose spare parts you can still get.
A fixed gooseneck is cleaner-looking and has less to go wrong. If you have a dishwasher doing the heavy lifting and you’re not filling buckets, it’s plenty. What matters more than either is spout height and reach: the spout should land near the centre of the bowl, not over the edge, and there should be enough clearance underneath to fit whatever you fill most often.
Phoenix Pina Pull Out Sink Mixer Brushed Nickel
One thing to check before you order
Australia’s lead-free plumbing product rules came into force on 1 May 2026, and they apply to products carrying drinking water — kitchen tapware included. Reputable suppliers have long since moved their ranges across, but if you’re being offered old stock at a suspiciously good price, it’s worth asking. The Victorian Building and Plumbing Commission explains the requirement here.
The measurement almost nobody checks
Here’s the one that causes real regret: the bench space on either side of the sink.
A sink needs somewhere to put the wet things and somewhere to put the dirty things. As a working rule I want roughly 600mm of clear bench on one side and at least 450mm on the other — which lines up with the NKBA’s kitchen planning guidelines. Squeeze below that and the sink becomes a bottleneck: the drying rack lives permanently on the bench, and there’s nowhere to stack anything while you work.
Two more numbers worth knowing before you shop:
- Cabinet width. A large single bowl generally wants a 900mm base cabinet. A 700mm-wide sink will not go into a 600mm cabinet, no matter how much you’d like it to.
- Bowl depth. Around 200mm is the comfortable range. Deeper hides more mess but means more bending, and it eats into the cabinet below where the plumbing and the bin live.
Worth it: sorting out the cabinet underneath
The sink cabinet is usually the worst-designed cabinet in an Australian kitchen. One deep dark cave, a set of pipes down the middle, a plastic bin hooked onto the door, and a graveyard of half-empty sprays at the back that nobody has reached since 2019.
Fixing that costs a fraction of what a stone upgrade costs and you’ll feel it every day. The things I specify most often: a U-shaped drawer that runs around the waste trap so the space actually gets used, a proper pull-out bin sized to your council’s bins rather than a token 10-litre one, and a small tray or drawer for the sponge, brush and dish liquid so none of it lives on the bench.
My view on storage generally, and it holds here: having the right storage in the right location matters more than the sheer quantity of it. A beautifully large cabinet you can’t reach into is not storage. It’s a cupboard-shaped apology.
Materials, honestly compared
Stainless steel. Still the most sensible choice for most homes and the one I specify most. It doesn’t stain, doesn’t chip, takes heat, and is repairable in the sense that scratches eventually blend into a patina. Look for a thicker gauge and sound-deadening pads underneath — the difference between a cheap steel sink and a good one is mostly noise. Downside: it shows water spots, and it will scratch.
Granite or composite. Matte, quiet, available in black and greys and the odd sand tone, and very good at hiding water marks. It suits a kitchen where you want the sink to disappear into a dark benchtop. Downside: it can mark from very hot pans, and pale composites can stain from turmeric, beetroot and red wine if left sitting.
Fireclay or ceramic (including the farmhouse look). Beautiful, heavy, and the right answer if you’re after a country or period feel. Downside: they chip, they’re unforgiving to dropped glassware, and an apron-front version has to be planned into the joinery from day one — it isn’t a swap you make later.
If you want the longer version of how materials behave across the whole kitchen, I’ve written about the best materials for kitchen cabinets and joinery in Australia as well.
Turner Hastings Novi 84 x 46 Fine Fireclay Gloss White Farmhouse Butler Sink
What I’d skip
The full accessory bundle. The colander, the chopping board that sits in the bowl, the roll-up drying mat, the caddy. They’re sold hard because the margin is good. Most people use one of them for a fortnight, then it lives in the bottom cabinet forever. Buy the sink, live with it for a month, then buy the one accessory you find yourself missing.
Drainer grooves routed into a stone benchtop. They photograph beautifully and they cost a lot. They also collect residue at the low end and they’re permanent. A dish rack you can put away is more flexible and hundreds of dollars cheaper.
A double bowl in a small kitchen. Covered above, but it’s worth repeating because it’s the most common thing I talk clients out of. Two small bowls means neither one is useful.
Matching your sink finish to your tap finish exactly. A brushed brass tap over a stainless bowl is completely fine. Mixing metals in a kitchen works the same way mixing gold and silver jewellery works — it just needs to look deliberate.
If you’re only upgrading one thing
Say the kitchen is staying and you have a modest budget for improvements. My order would be:
- The tap, if yours is stiff, short or leaking. Biggest daily difference per dollar in the entire kitchen.
- The under-sink cabinet — a pull-out bin and a U-drawer. Cheap, fast, and it clears the bench.
- The sink itself, if it’s a bowl-and-a-half and your benchtop can take a replacement without a re-template.
A tap swap on an existing sink is usually a straightforward plumber’s job, and it’s the change people tell me they notice most. If a kitchen reno is somewhere on the horizon rather than happening this month, save this link — the discount comes through the link itself, there’s no code to type in, and the amount depends on what you’re buying. Prices and stock move around, so treat anything you see today as a snapshot.
Decide where the sink goes before you decide what it is
Everything above assumes the sink is in a sensible place. If it isn’t, no amount of tapware will save it.
The sink’s position sets the whole rhythm of the kitchen: how far you carry a dripping colander, whether the dishwasher door blocks the walkway when it’s open, whether two people can be in there at once without one of them sighing. Almost every kitchen I’ve renovated kept its plumbing exactly where it was — Evergreen, The Sage, Fourty-one — and got better anyway, because the layout around the sink was reworked rather than the services being moved. Moving a sink is expensive. Moving what surrounds it usually isn’t.
If you’re staring at a plan and can’t tell whether the sink is in the right spot, that’s exactly what Fix My Floor Plan is for — send me the plan and the problem, and you get a layout recommendation back. And if you’d rather work it out yourself, the Kitchen Layout Dictionary goes much deeper than a blog post can: all 50 layouts, standard sizes, zones and workflow, and how to read a floor plan properly.
While you’re here, two more worth a read: 8 ridiculous kitchen design mistakes to avoid and walk-in pantry vs cabinet pantry.
Still not sure what’s right for your own place?
That’s the part I do — and there are two ways in, depending on how much you need sorted.
Fix My Floor Plan — $297 a room. Send me your floor plan and a few photos. I’ll tell you what I’d change: where the furniture goes, what’s making the room feel awkward, and the practical next steps to fix it. Back with you in 5–7 business days, and there’s not a single meeting involved.
Or a Design Consultation — $550. Ninety minutes on your whole space: layout, colours, materials, joinery, storage, or just a second opinion before you commit to something expensive. Online, wherever you are in the world.
