The kitchen has traveled through as many phases as color in any other room in the house: possibly the swing from dark to light to dark again has been even greater.
Successively, we have seen kitchens paneled in wood in the Early American manner, kitchens cloaked in white from top to toe like a laboratory, and kitchens softened with pastels.
A few years ago, the look of wood again turned up in the kitchen. Since the kitchen had become more and more a room to live in pleasantly as well as a room to perform in efficiently, the mellow quality of wood gave it harmony — a restful warmth.
Now, as a direct sequel to the wood look, color is finding its way back into the kitchen in the form of H&G’s deeper, more mellow hues that shed their rich light on everything in the room, and give it the burnished glow of a Flemish still life.
To give definition to a background of deep color, however, you should introduce small contrasting shocks of light. This is not hard to achieve, since even the smallest jolts of sharp color will come across with potency.
ALSO SEE: This blueberry blue kitchen offered the ultimate in convenience back in the 60s
A contemporary kitchen with a number of wide-open spaces became more intimate and more restful when lined with subtly glowing color.
In this black 60s kitchen, the birch cabinets were rubbed with H&G’s Black Pearl, which gave a lovely effect — the rich grain of wood emphasized by overtones of color.
To set off this deep gray, the owners added lots of white on the walls and the countertops, plus cool licks of brilliant blue, specifically: Delphinium Blue on the hood of the exhaust fan over the cooking counter, a mosaic of blue tiles around the sink, and various little collected objects touched with blue — such as glass paperweights, Mexican tin flowers, and butterfly-embellished mugs.
