As a designer, choosing materials and colors for a room comes very naturally to me. But to many, these decisions can be challenging. Let’s take a kitchen for example. The many elements of building a kitchen can seem overwhelming. What cabinet color do I choose? What flooring will look best with my cabinets? If I choose a dark floor, what color do I paint my walls? So many decisions - Yikes!
Today I thought I would walk you through exactly how I coordinated my kitchen; colors, flooring, cabinetry - you name it. It’s all a balancing act, so let me lead the way.
When I began designing my kitchen, I knew I wanted some color, but not too much. I also knew I wanted a hand-scraped solid wood floor ("World Traveler" in the color “Trail" from Shaw Floors was my all-time favorite and ultimately what I ended up choosing). Designing a kitchen is a lot like putting together a puzzle - each decision needs to be well thought-out so the pieces will all fit together perfectly. Having my “must haves" in mind helped me put together my puzzle.
Let's start with the dark wood floor and work our way up. World Traveler by Shaw Floors was my #1 choice for flooring. One of my favorite things about the flooring we chose was the variance in color. With two kids and two cats, we wanted a floor that would hide dirt (and maybe a few crumbs). I also loved the hand-scraped finish on World Traveler. Even with the kids dragging their toys all throughout my house and the cats’ claws, and you will never see a single scratch thanks to the incredible ScufResist™ Platinum finish. It’s amazing!
I loved this floor so much that I just knew I needed to have it not only in my kitchen, but in my entire house. Since we chose this floor for our open-concept downstairs, I needed to make the kitchen work with the floor that we loved so dearly.
Once our flooring decision was made, we moved on to cabinet color. In order to add a pop of color, I decided to paint the island black (Black Magic black by Sherwin Williams). Since my island was such a deep tone of black, I needed a white countertop to contrast (we chose Aria Quartzite; a natural stone which you can read more about here). The deep brown tones of our floor work so well with the black island and bright-white countertop. I was so happy we went with that fun pop of color!
Since I still wanted our kitchen to feel bright and airy, I painted the remaining perimeter lower cabinets white (Dove White by Sherwin Williams), as well as the uppers. To contrast the bright white cabinets, I chose a black man-made quartz countertop, which coordinated nicely with the black island.
My black and white color scheme was coming along just as planned, so I decided to continue that theme on the walls. For the paint color, I chose the same Dove White on the perimeter cabinets. I did, however, want one of the walls in the kitchen to stand out, so I sectioned out an area of the kitchen to install floor-to-ceiling white subway tile (2x8 white ceramic) with a dark grout. This accent wall stood out beautifully against our hand-scraped solid wood floors andmade the entire space come together,feeling complete. In my opinion, tile in a kitchen doesn’t just have to live on the floor or backsplash. Adding tile all the way up to the ceiling is such a creative way to add a dramatic statement wall and make the space feel taller.
Now that you’ve walked through my design process, you understand what I mean when I say designing a kitchen is a lot like a puzzle. I suggest starting with a few “must-haves” for the space and going from there. Since our main “must-have” was our flooring, that created a domino effect on many of the other decisions we made. I’m so happy with how everything turned out and wouldn’t have changed a thing!
If you would like to follow more of my design adventures, make sure to follow along at The Blissful Bee.