No Comments »

Design Dilemma: 5 Ways to Add Personality in a Kitchen

• Tweet

• Tweet

Below is a traditional kitchen that appears fresh, open and modern, simply because there are no upper cabinets but lots and lots of windows instead.

And here we see a more modern look. The owners used the empty wall for sleek tiles and a television.

Empty walls in the kitchen below was the opportunity to hang a dramatic piece of art.

In the kitchen above, open shelves are an opportunity to add color and decorative objects, including plants, for a cozy, homey look.

In this London kitchen, open shelves provide an opportunity to display beautiful pottery and a collection of vintage kitchen canisters. In fact, canisters like these are necessary to making this work, as they protect food from dust and keep shelves looking more uniform and tidy.

3. Play with texture and materials.

Bring new, unexpected textures into the kitchen including rough stone, raw wood and steel. Above, rough stone walls pack a huge punch in a casual, farmstyle kitchen. And look how texture transforms a plain white kitchen into something truly cosmopolitan, below.

Below, concrete, wood and metal up the cool factor in a loft kitchen.

And here, textured metal as a backsplash.

And below, textured cabinets add a note of refinement to an elegantly modern kitchen.

4. Add a cool backsplash.

One sure-fire way to add personality to any kitchen is to pep things up with a snappy backsplash. Here are a few examples.

The traditional kitchen below would look utterly run of the mill, except for the colorful tile backsplash.

This patterned tile backsplash is a beauty and again the focal point in an all-white kitchen.

And below, a metal backsplash is unexpected and fresh.

5. Add color.

There’s no more powerful way to inject a dose of personality than to emboldened your kitchen with color. Take a look at the examples below:

And this:

The message is clear. If you want more personality in your kitchen you can have it!