Expert Panel: Kitchen Color

Mellow yellow. If you're looking for a take on a French Normandy country home, yellow might be your color. "This room 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 indicative of a French color palette, and the hand-done plaster technique on the walls, with the overglaze of a faux-finish technique, makes the walls look aged."

"Using just one color in the room allows for other features to shine such as the wonderful wrought iron light fixtures, the copper hood, and the slate floor," she says. "The oak board and Chinese slate floor is a take off on the beautiful herringbone wood floors that you sometimes see in French homes."

Dutch blue. Occasionally, one element drives the color scheme. "The owner chose the color to match the delft tiles," says James Crisp of Crisp Architects. "It's actually a faux finish with an overcoat of a black texture."

The warmth of orange. It's a pretty bold choice for a kitchen, but when you hear architect Mark English talk about this room's color palette, it makes perfect sense: "The home is sited on a hill with a 270-degree, long-distance view toward the east and northeast. The color of the light coming into the house tends toward gray and bluish tones, so the orange was used to counteract the coolness of those 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 elements."

Serene gray. This kitchen is part of an urban loft. "We attempted to create a sophisticated room that is well organized and complementary within a much larger space," says Ayhan Ozan of Chelsea Atelier Architect. "The color gray has a subtle authority to it, without entirely surrendering the serenity of the open loft to the kitchen."

Not your basic black. For some people, black might seem to be as bold a choice as orange. But in a home with a limited color palette — black, white, blue, and gray — it fits right in.

"The counters are honed black slate, and the cabinets are zebra wood that's been stained indigo blue to essentially make them striped blue and black," says Joel Kelly of Joel Kelly Design.

"The kitchen and dining room in this house are one large room, about 50 feet long," he adds. "The primary cabinet wall turns into a paneled wall in the dining room, creating a seamless wall of wood along the length of the house. The kitchen becomes a backdrop for the activity in the house."

Barn red. Blackburn Architects notes that this kitchen is a "project that salvages a historic German-style bank barn that fell into serious decay and readapts it into a private family entertainment space."

Tell us: What color is your kitchen? Please post a photo and tell us about it in the Comments section below.

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