Get Cooking with Color

Refresh the kitchen with splashes of banana yellow, pistachio green or eggshell white. Let favorite foods inspire color choices to create tasty décor

By Mary Fons
CTW Features

Image courtesy Erin Adams & Allison Spears

For many people, the kitchen is the center of the house. Home is where the food is, after all, and the kitchen is the source of Saturday-morning pancake preparation, Mom’s casseroles and late-night noshing. But the kitchen can be even more inviting with a color scheme that warms hearts while the microwave warms the leftovers.

For those with small spaces, choosing a light or neutral shade can make the kitchen appear much larger than it is. Joanna DiPaola recently remodeled her New York kitchen and chose an off-white background as the backdrop.

“The color is calm and clean,” says DiPaola. “It helps make our small kitchen seem bigger and makes it a more enjoyable space to cook.” DiPaola says she almost went with a pale green, but that she had to take the rest of the house into consideration, too. “That was my first choice, but we painted our hallway burgundy and the pale green wouldn't match.”

Interior designer Ruthie Allan, in the business since 1994, says that when clients use food terms to describe what they want, it helps the process tremendously – and what better room to describe in a “foodie-way” than the kitchen?

“I think that a good way of relating to color are colors that exist in nature,” says the Chicago-based designer. “Grass, tree bark. If you’re talking to a client and they say, ‘I want coffee brown or banana yellow,’ you automatically know what they're saying. Using foods to describe color is a universal color language.”

Allen adds that trends and “hot” color schemes come and go – the best color for a kitchen is the one that pleases the person who will be in that room the most. That’s you. “I stay away from ‘hot colors,’ she says. “I tend to work with a client's color sensibility. You just have to steer them clear of color no no's.”

Are there no no’s for a kitchen? It’s been scientifically proven that colors do tend to arouse emotion in people, however subtly (i.e., you’ll be much more relaxed in a bedroom painted robin’s egg blue than one that’s chartreuse). Some people feel strongly that a kitchen shouldn’t be painted red, pink, or purple, as these colors can encourage lack of harmony and can even inspire arguments. Since the kitchen is ideally a place of comfort, pistachio green, light camel, or eggshell white may be slightly more soothing shades to choose. Plus, these color schemes create a neutral backdrop if you have great kitchen appliances or art you want to show off.

When asked what she might do if she had an unlimited kitchen budget, Paula Nixon, a personal trainer in the Chicago area says she would use “Stainless-steel appliances, cool aqua-teal toned cabinetry and gray-slate countertops [because] this color scheme could make my colorful pottery collection 'pop' out, which I like to display atop my kitchen cabinets. The aqua-colors would soothe me as I spend time in the kitchen.”

Nixon also adds that though red is supposed to be a taboo color, a good friend of hers has a red wall in his kitchen that works beautifully with his black-and-white checkerboard tiling.

“My kitchen is where everyone gathers any time I entertain,” says Nixon. “Whether it’s one person or 10, my friends love to lean on the counters and watch me cook, help me sample, and prepare dinner. On those occasions, I savor my kitchen as the warmest and most welcoming room in my home.”

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