Color and Texture in Your Kitchen Design
Creating a kitchen that not only works well but lives well involves much more than choosing the right appliances or filling the room with custom cabinetry. While these practical considerations are vital to the success of your kitchen design, they are only a part of the overall ambiance that defines a comfortable, livable kitchen. Color, texture, the flow of light across a room, the mix of interesting materials and finishes and the three-dimensional character of the kitchen must all work in concert.
The challenge of choosing and coordinating these visual and tactile elements can be a difficult one. Even the most serene and minimal of modern designs requires a very careful balance of color, light and detail. The range of the color gray, for instance, extends from a warm off-white to a cool slate blue with every shade imaginable in between. While all may be ‘grays’, the final effect of each may be very different. Combine that effect with a choice of related textures, colors and materials and achieving that minimalist design becomes a real challenge.
Color is more than a tone on a paint chip or a dyed thread in a fabric swatch. It is the way that paint tone looks splashed across a wall with a range of daylight crossing it. It is influenced by other colors reflected off of nearby objects or surfaces. It is combined with the texture of the surface it is on, a texture that reflects light in its own unique way and has the added element of touch involving resiliency and temperature. These influences change colors making them cooler or warmer, darker or lighter, brighter or more muted.
Your use of color and texture in your kitchen design must consider all of these attributes, the many materials involved and the overall result. To achieve this you need to develop a palette of color, texture and ultimately, materials, to work from while creating your design. To develop such a palette you can use one of several different processes or models. In this section we’ll look at a few of those models and show you two in-depth examples of how to use them.
