Transform your kitchen using warmth, vibrancy or cooling tones in timeless and surprising combinations.
Our guide decodes kitchen colour trends and processes for discerning the best colour for your kitchen, so you can begin building your own kitchen colour palette.
Whether you’re working with a spacious area or smaller kitchen or pantry, there are many styles of kitchen paint colour to inspire your design.
These kitchen colour combinations always seem clean, contemporary and inviting.
The newest colour designs often take popular or timeless colour combinations in a subtle but inspired direction.
It would be wrong to see popular kitchen colour combinations as simply those with “mass appeal”. These colour palettes crop in kitchens time and again precisely because of their distinctive personality and lasting impact rather than resale appeal.
With ample room to play with, no colour is off the menu. But the opportunity to play with colours otherwise unavailable to smaller spaces due to their size and available light is often too great a temptation.
Smaller spaces, and especially pantry areas, will benefit from light colours and reflective finishes to assist the travel of light around the room.
While kitchen colour combinations draw upon many sources of inspiration including trends, personal preferences and colour theory, a simple way to start your search for a kitchen colour scheme is using colour psychology.
For example, cool blues exude calmness, while yellows are associated with energy and cheerfulness. Warm, deeper colours, like reds are said to stimulate appetite.
The trend of “colour drenching” also has a psychological benefit. The cohesiveness of matching many shades of the same colour supposedly has a calming effect on the mind, as the eye isn’t darting around the room to comprehend contrasting colours and features.
Whatever you want from your kitchen colour palette, looking into how you personally respond to different colours and combinations could be a good place to start.
Whether you’re installing a brand new kitchen or working with existing features, you’ll need to consider the interplay of colours from different sources.
The list is longer than you might think. Depending on what you have in your kitchen, you can control or incorporate different colours from:
Once you’ve identified all the potential colour influences in your kitchen, you can decide the role each one might play through its colour.
A sneaky tip for balancing the tones in your colour palette is to use the 60:30:10 rule, where the dominant colour occupies 60% of the space, the secondary 30%, and the accent colour is used across 10% of the space. How you apply this ratio to the available elements in your kitchen is up to you.
For a less mathematical approach, you can consider the impact of colour from certain fixtures.
For example, a floating kitchen island in a dark colour could be used to create depth and an anchor point for the entire kitchen space around which to bring in other shades or complementing colours.
The complex grain in wood cabinets or natural stone worktops could provide the inspiration for a palette of colours which can be extended to different areas of the kitchen.
Cabinet handles - whether matt, chrome, or a contrasting white - can also be used to make rich-coloured cabinets pop.
If you prefer a more monochromatic look, you can also use different textures rather than colours to create a perceptible difference in the colour scheme. On the other hand, if you’re struggling to tie together two or more colour schemes, a bridging colour, perhaps across tile work, can help to create balance and bring them together.