Design to Eat: Decorating Ideas for Food Lovers

Food is inspiring a whole new look for the home, and it's not just about the kitchen. A love of good eats knows no décor bounds

By Mary Fons
CTW Features

Great meals have a way of vanishing: The better they are, the more quickly that happens, but by decorating a home with a food-inspired color palette, decorators can prolong those gastronomic pleasures.

Ruthie Alan, a residential interior designer at Jean Alan, an interior design firm in Chicago’s trendy Bucktown neighborhood, says most people have a close relationship to color based on what they see in nature, food included.

“If I’m talking to a client and they say, ‘I want coffee brown or banana yellow,’ I automatically know what they’re saying.” Alan says that food terms provide a great vocabulary for an individual to express his or her design desires. “Using foods to describe color is a universal language.”

Food itself is speaking so loudly, in fact, that celebrity chefs from the ubiquitous Rachael Ray and Emeril Lagasse to popular but lesser-known personalities Michael Chiarello and Alton Brown are lending their names – and culinary styles – to kitchen décor. Italian chef Mario Batali’s Cast Iron Essentials series comes in food-inspired hues such persimmon, pesto and espresso. KitchenAid now offers mixers in bing cherry, caviar, green apple mango and pistachio.

Karen Kowalski, a full-time student and mother in Milwaukee, says that her favorite colors are all inspired by her favorite foods.

“Cherry red, asparagus green, Bavarian chocolate brown, concord grape purple, Dreamsicle orange. I could go on and on,” she says. Kowalski notes that when she and her husband were putting color into their new home, they looked on their plates to find inspiration and then translated that into their home décor. They found that nature complimented the palette in ways they didn’t even anticipate.

“My kitchen is the biggest room in the house,” says Kowalski. “Our window seat overlooks a forest and a pond – talk about earth tones!” Kowalski says that actual food adds color to her home, too: canned fruits and vegetables, dried herbs and fresh flowers all fit right in to her tasty color choices.

Kitchens aren’t the ending point, however. Pottery Barn offers window treatments in bisque, espresso and wheat; Ralph Lauren towels come in chili pepper, mandarin and bay leaf; and nearly every sofa, rug or throw pillow is available in chocolate, sage, olive and tarragon. Alan believes that as gardening has lessened as hobby and cooking has gone mainstream, manufacturers have begun shifting color offerings from floral inspiration to food hues.

If you’re stuck with a troublesome room, Alan says it often helps to consult your appetite. By zeroing in on the food colors that elicit joy, the amateur decorator will choose a scheme that’s likely to make the mouth water for years to come. When recently faced with a design challenge, Alan allowed her foodie imagination to run wild; suddenly, she cooked up the perfect inspiration.

“I’m doing a kitchen family room,” she says. “There isn’t anything particularly remarkable about the architecture of the space, and not enough natural light. To brighten the space, I’m using honey-colored bamboo kitchen cabinets with milk-white glass. The banquet will be faux leather in a deep raisin. The upholstered furniture will be in olives and pistachios, and the [nearby] powder room will be done in brown sugar-colored miniature-glass beaded wallpaper.”

Sounds good enough to eat.

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