Japandi Joinery with a View

There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with designing joinery for a builder's own house, especially when that builder plans to walk future clients through it. It's not just a home, it's a portfolio piece.

That was the brief for this Wanaka project: a two-story home with the living space upstairs, taking full advantage of the lake views, and joinery running through the kitchen, bathroom vanities, wardrobes, laundry, and under-stair storage. The brief called for Japandi, that quiet blend of Japanese restraint and Scandinavian warmth brought to life in walnut.

starting with the kitchen.

Upstairs, where the living happens, the kitchen needed to do a lot without shouting about it. We mixed a walnut finish cabinetry with soft white walls to keep things feeling light against those mountain views, and let a curved island wrapped in fluted walnut panelling take centre stage. That fluted texture (Dezignatek Swurve panelling in Tahoe Walnut) is giving the joinery a tactile, almost sculptural quality instead of just a flat run of doors.

Above the cooktop, a soft, curved, fluted walnut range hood turns a practical necessity into a real moment. Proof that even the everyday bits deserve a bit of design love.

The lightly veined stone benchtops sit beautifully against the Prime Panels Tahoe Walnut joinery, a warm, understated palette that lets the timber really sing.

the details within the joinery.

This is where a lot of the real design work happens, and where a builder-client (who notices everything) really puts a design to the test. Every drawer in this kitchen runs on Blum Merivobox soft-close runners, with inner drawers fitted for proper knife and utensil storage.

bathrooms & wardrobes.

The Japandi thread continues through to the bathrooms, where a floating walnut vanity sits beneath an arched mirror, a nice counterpoint to all the straight lines elsewhere in the joinery. All bathroom tiling came through Flooring Xtra, and the vanity joinery (right down to the handles) stayed in Prime Tahoe Walnut, keeping the material story consistent from kitchen to bathroom.

Wardrobes picked up the same walnut detailing, tying every room back to a single, cohesive material language rather than treating each space in isolation.

a house build to be shown.

Because this home doubles as a showcase for future clients, every specification needed to be something the builder could point to and say "this is what we can do." From the Blum drawer runners to the tap fittings to the tiles, every product is named, sourced, and ready to be reimagined in the next build.

It's a lovely reminder that good joinery design isn't just about how a space looks on move-in day. It's about the small, considered decisions — a drawer that glides shut properly, a handle that disappears into the line of the door — that a home lives with for years to come.

the people & the products:

morven build

Form joinery

Brad Willetts Photography

Flooring Xtra Wanaka

Dezignatek Swirves

Prime Panels