Decorating with Color - Part Two - KITCHEN COLORS

If all of the home decorating magazines I have seen are any indication, the new KITCHEN colors for 2008 are going to be brighter, bolder, citrus colors. These are lively colors that bring a feeling of playfulness and life into a room. They are great colors for your kitchens. They will brighten even the dullest, darkest room. The new greens range from Lime Greens to more mellow greens. The yellows range from mellow yellows to bright Yellow Limes. The deeper yellows are warmer colors and not in the family of colors I am discussing here. The greens and yellows go very well with white painted furniture, while the Oranges, which span from a deep orange to a light tangerine, work well with both unpainted and white wood finishes. The Oranges are the warm colors in this spectrum, while the Greens and Yellows are cooler colors. So the note here is, when painting in a room with wood surfaces, white is cool, bare wood is warm. When thinking about your color, look at the windows in the room. Are they large or small? Do you have a lot of windows or a just one? The thing I want you to focus on, is what do you see out of the windows? To bring a lovely view into the room find a focal point outside and bring that one color into the room. Your window is like a picture frame. By putting that color on the wall, you will accent the view in the window. If you want to draw attention from the window, head in the opposite direction on the color wheel.

When my husband first suggested a lime green in my white kitchen I thought he was nuts. I was wrong though. We painted out kitchen using Martha Stewart's Pea Shoot which is a beautiful, soft lime green. Before we painted, our kitchen was all white. The floors are made of Hackberry wood, which is a very light wood with dark highlights. Our cabinets are all white, as are the counter tops and appliances. The kitchen was very nice all white, but it became very boring, very quickly, and was actually high maintenance because it was so "white". The kitchen of our home is now a bright meeting place for all who visit. The white cabinets became the focal point in the room, rather than the wood floor, and no longer disappeared into the wall.