Kitchen of the Year Winners
Gaggenau has announced the winners of its 2025 Kitchen of the Year Award, which recognises spaces that transcend functionality to become cultural and social touchstones of the home.
Tobias Partners, Madeleine Blanchfield Architects and Freadman White have been named as the winners of Gaggenau’s 2025 Kitchen of the Year Award, one of Australasia’s most esteemed design accolades. The practices won, respectively, the Best of the Best, Luxury Home and Multi-Residential categories for their originality, clarity of vision and ability to position the kitchen as the nexus of contemporary life.
The kitchen contrasts pale brickwork with dramatic black joinery and is bookended by elegant courtyards, creating a space defined by light and proportion.
Tobias Partners won the Best of the Best award for Woollahra Village House, the transformation of a heritage residence in Sydney’s eastern suburbs into a light-filled sanctuary defined by spatial clarity and material restraint. The light timber kitchen extends along the southern wall of the communal living space, opening up to an immaculately proportioned courtyard garden.
Also in Sydney is Vessel, a three-storey Victorian terrace reimagined by Madeleine Blanchfield Architects. Winner of the Luxury Home category, the Darlinghurst residence is almost monastic in its simplicity, designed for a professional couple who relish both privacy and entertaining. Like the remainder of the house, the kitchen contrasts pale brickwork with dramatic black joinery and is bookended by elegant courtyards, creating a space defined by light and proportion.
Freadman White took out the Multi-Residential category for 131 Smith Street, a carbon-neutral apartment complex in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Here, the kitchens have been designed as warm, welcoming spaces, blending refined sweeps of marble with cabinetry in tranquil hues to become sublime focal points for modern urban living.
This year’s awards were judged by a stellar lineup of Australasian design names including Eva-Marie Prineas of Studio Prineas, Sue Carr from Carr (represented by Ben Nicholas on deliberation day), Damian Hannah of New Zealand’s German Kitchens Limited, Richard Archer of Archer Design, Mim Design’s Miriam Fanning and Martin Cooper of Cooper & Associates.
“The calibre of entries this year was extraordinary,” says Olya Yemchenko, senior brand manager at Gaggenau. “The jury’s task was by no means an easy one but what impressed us most was the depth of thinking and the way each project positioned the kitchen as the true anchor of the home.”
As Best of the Best winner, Tobias Partners will travel to France in 2026 for an exclusive tour of the Gaggenau factory in Lipsheim and then onto Milan for Salone del Mobile and EuroCucina. The other award winners, along with the runners-up in those categories – Yukari House by Tanev Muir Architects in Luxury Home and Monument by K2LD in Multi-Residential – will be honoured with a unique culinary experience hosted by Gaggenau.
