I was walking back from the market the other Saturday, past one of those narrow terraces on a side street off Clarendon, and there it was again: a washing machine, half in and half out of what I can only describe as a converted cupboard, with the door propped open by a broom because it wouldn’t shut otherwise. If you live around here, you’ll have seen a version of this. Maybe you’ve lived it.
South Melbourne does a lot of things well. Big, sensible laundries are not one of them. Between the Victorian terraces with their skinny floor plans and the newer apartment blocks that treat a laundry as an afterthought squeezed into a hallway cupboard, most of us are working with a fraction of the space a laundry actually wants. And yet the washing still needs doing, somehow, in whatever gap is left over once the fridge and the hot water system have taken their cut.
Worth a mention if you’re in one of the older terraces: a fair few of them sit inside a heritage overlay, which mostly concerns itself with what you can see from the street rather than what you’re doing to the laundry out the back. Still, if the renovation is stretching beyond swapping a sink and starts touching layout or structure, it’s worth a quick check of what Council actually requires before you get too far into planning it.
So here’s what I’ve picked up, mostly the hard way, about making a small laundry actually work rather than just fit.
The problem is rarely the machine
Everyone blames the washing machine for eating the space, but it’s usually the sink that gets sacrificed first. A lot of older places either never had a laundry trough to begin with, or got one at some point that’s genuinely too big for the room, some enormous concrete number left over from decades ago that eats half the bench you’d otherwise have for sorting whites from darks or soaking something that’s gone wrong at dinner.
The fix isn’t to go without a sink. It’s to stop assuming you need the standard-issue one. There’s a real difference between a laundry that’s been planned and one that’s just had a sink wedged in because that’s what turned up on special.
What actually helps in a tight laundry
A few things make more difference than people expect, going by the terraces and units I’ve seen renovated around here:
Going narrower, not smaller. A sink that’s deep but narrow holds a mop bucket or a soaking load just as well as a wide one, without eating into your bench run. Worth measuring your actual gap before you fall for whatever’s on the showroom floor.
Drop-in over undermount, most of the time. Undermount looks lovely, but it wants a stone or solid benchtop to sit into properly, which is a bigger job than most small-laundry renovations are signing up for. A drop-in sink does the same job on a laminate bench without the extra trade involved.
A single bowl with an overflow, not a double. Double bowls are great in a kitchen, less useful in a laundry the size of a walk-in robe. One decent bowl with an overflow built in covers soaking, hand washing and the occasional mop bucket without needing the floor space a second bowl demands.
Stainless if the laundry gets hard use, fireclay if you actually look at it. If the laundry doubles as a mudroom for a dog or a couple of bikes, stainless earns its keep. If it’s more of a genuine room that opens off the kitchen (increasingly common in the townhouse renovations going up around here), a fireclay or granite composite sink holds up just as well and looks considerably better doing it.
Worth checking the water rating label on whatever tap or sink combination you land on as well. A laundry does more water-heavy work over a week than most other rooms in the house, so the star rating is one of the easier ways to compare options before you commit to one.
None of this is exotic. It’s mostly just picking a sink sized for the room you’ve actually got, rather than the room a display kitchen assumes everyone has.
Where to actually look
This is the bit that took me longest to work out. Most of what turns up when you search for laundry sinks is either enormous catering-grade stuff meant for a shed, or so basic it looks like it belongs in a service station. There’s a reasonable middle ground if you know where to look, and it’s worth going somewhere that actually stocks a proper range of sizes and mounting types rather than the two or three options a hardware chain keeps in stock. Abey’s range of laundry sinks is a decent place to start if you want to see the actual spread of drop-in, undermount, single and double options side by side, since they’ve got a showroom not far from here in Albert Park if you’d rather see the sizes in person before committing to anything.
Renovating a small laundry isn’t glamorous. Nobody puts it on a mood board. But get the sink right and the rest of the room tends to sort itself out around it, which is about as much as you can ask from the smallest room in the house.
