Professional Panel: Kitchen Colour
When you walk into your own kitchen in the morning, would you need to be greeted by a big, bold splash of colour? Or maybe you’d like to start your day in a muted black and white world and then slowly have it transform itself to Technicolor glory? In any event, I am certain that somewhere over this kitchen rainbow, there’s a color that’s just right for you.
J. Stephens Interiors
Mellow yellow. If you’re searching for a take on a French Normandy nation home, yellow could be your colour. “This chamber was designed to emulate what a kitchen might look like in the countryside of France,” says Jo Ann Alston, principal at J. Stephens Interiors. “The mustard yellow is very reminiscent of a French colour palette, and also the hand-done plaster technique on the walls, together with all the overglaze of a faux-finish technique, creates the walls look aged.”
“With only one colour in the area allows for other attributes to shine such as the amazing wrought iron lighting fittings, the copper hood, and the slate floor,” she says. “The bamboo plank and Chinese slate floor is a take off on the beautiful herringbone wood floors that you sometimes see in French houses.”
Crisp Architects
Dutch blue. Sometimes, one element drives the colour scheme. “The proprietor chose the colour to match the delft tiles,” says James Crisp of Crisp Architects. “It’s actually a faux finish with an overcoat of a black texture.”
Bradford Design LLC
White on white. This kitchen is in sync with the general design of the house. “It’s a part of a brand new French-inspired home on South River in Annapolis, Maryland,” says Brad Creer of Bradford Design. “The wife desired an ancestral house both indoors and out, including the furniture. The only other colours are the restricted use in some of the beams. And also the only nonwhite space in the residence is the husband’s large barroom, with a dark wood finish.”
AIA, Mark English Architects
The heat of orange. It’s a fairly daring alternative for a kitchen, but when you hear architect Mark English talk about the area’s color palette, it makes great sense: “The home is sited on a mountain with a 270-degree, long-distance view toward the east and northeast. The colour of this light coming to the house tends toward gray and bluish tones, so the orange has been used to counteract the coolness of these tones. The island and upper cabinets are ‘pieces’ that can be seen from adjacent rooms, and I wanted to highlight them. The regular base cabinets and full-height cabinets are meant to be background components.”
Robin Rigby Fisher CMKBD/CAPS
Brown is not dull. Kitchen and bathroom specialist Robin Rigby Fisher explains that “this kitchen sits between a first 1918 Craftsman formal dining area and a contemporary family room. The only constant has been the dark woodwork throughout both spaces. We also had the challenge of designing around a ceiling height which has a 9-inch difference from one side of the beam to another, so we opted to incorporate the dark wood accent as a crown molding. The intention was to draw your attention around the space, with the objective of decreasing the height discrepancy.
The midtone cherry cabinets fit the furnishings in the 2 rooms. The tile backsplash is custom-cut slate in two distinct colours that match the first brick in the dining room fireplace. The final result is a kitchen which feels contemporary when somebody is searching into the family area and traditional when looking to the dining room.
Momoko Morton
Purple passion. This project was to get a cooking school in Denver, but there’s no reason you can’t import purple into your home kitchen. “Katy Hume, the chef and proprietor of Stir Cooking School, has a contagious personality, and we desired her vivacity to be portrayed inside the plan,” says Momoko Morton of Naka Designs. “The interior consequently needed to be lively and full of color.”
“Our primary aim was to produce the room unique, inviting, playful and inspiring,” she explains. “Eggplant purple evokes the colour of royalty, and it connotes luxury, wealth and elegance. The glow of its tone tends to imbibe the qualities of femininity and romance.”
Chelsea Atelier Architect, PC
Serene gray. This kitchen is part of an urban loft. “We attempted to make a sophisticated room that is well organized and complementary inside a much larger space,” says Ayhan Ozan of Chelsea Atelier Architect. “The colour gray has a subtle power for this, without completely surrendering the serenity of the open loft to the kitchen.”
LDa Architecture & Interiors
A natural green. “This farmhouse kitchen has been imagined to be an extremely efficient working-living space comprising natural materials that express their own beauty,” says Douglas Dick of LDa Architecture & Interiors. “The monochromatic green colour palette of the island and walls cabinetry has been selected to be visually calming and also to boost the subject of expressing the beauty of the area’s organic materials.”
These include base and wall cabinets constructed of a natural-finish clear maple; the back countertop, which is a honed light-cream granite; and an island with a maple butcher block counter that came out of a mature tree on the property which has been felled during a previous building project.
Joel Kelly Design
Not your basic black. For some individuals, black might appear to be as daring a option as orange. But in a home with a restricted color palette — black, white, white, blue, and gray — it fits straight in.
“The counters are honed black slate, and the cabinets are zebra wood that’s been stained indigo blue to basically make them striped blue and black,” says Joel Kelly of Joel Kelly Design.
“The kitchen and dining area in this house are just one large area, about 50 ft long,” he adds. “The key cabinet wall turns into a paneled wall in the dining area, creating a seamless wall of timber along the length of the house. The kitchen becomes a background for the activity in the house.”
Blackburn Architects, PC
Barn red. Blackburn Architects notes that this kitchen is a “project that salvages a historical German-style bank barn which dropped into serious corrosion and readapts it into a personal family entertainment space.”
Tell us What color is your kitchen? Please post a photograph and tell us about it in the Comments section below.
More:
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Sample Bright Color in the Kitchen