Kitchen

This unremarkable “cherry wood cave with black plastic counter tops” in the suburbs of Chicago was transformed into a dreamy kitchen, full of personality and luxurious finishes. The homeowner spent months searching for the perfect interior designer, someone who would bring authenticity to the project, and the wait was clearly well worth it.

When Kia Designs renovated a house in London that had been previously used as a house share, they knew they had a lot of work ahead of them—especially in the kitchen, which was easily the worst part of the house. They hoped it would come to be the heart of the home, a place that people would love to gather in and hate to leave. To give you a sense of how far this room came, take a look at it in it’s original state: Clearly, mission accomplished!

Zachary Leung’s Toronto kitchen was recently declared the 2017 Remodelista Considered Design Awards Best Amateur Kitchen, and it’s not hard to see why. He lovingly converted this 130-year-old dark and awkward room into a space that’s somehow both timeless and of-the-moment, with room for entertaining, laundry, and cleverly concealed storage. It’s hard to believe this was designed by someone who doesn’t do interior design full-time for a living.

To share a mere 478-square-feet with another human has its challenges. But to share and successfully use only 38 square feet of kitchen space is even more impressive! There were many design dilemmas facing Ali and Chip when they purchased this small Brooklyn apartment three years ago, but none so mammoth as the task of making a teeny tiny kitchen work for two people who enjoy cooking.

There are so many reasons to remodel your kitchen. You just bought a house and you hate what’s there now. Perhaps you finally saved up some money and can afford the change. Or, you plan to sell the home in a couple of years and think new cabinets will appeal to buyers. All good reasons, but do you want to know the most common thing that pushed people to finally take the plunge and redo their kitchens? #1 Reason: Because homeowners just can’t stand their current one anymore.

IKEA kitchens—and bathrooms and wardrobes—are super-popular, but sometimes you want to kick things up a notch and move past the ubiquitous IKEA look. These six companies craft cabinet fronts, panels, and more in a wide variety of materials, colors, and styles. Some of them will even work with you to create fronts in custom colors and styles. Design your basic IKEA kitchen layout, and then head to one of these companies to make it the kitchen of your dreams.

When Giovanni purchased his Brooklyn condo, the kitchen had barely any cabinet space — and almost no workspace to speak of. His kitchen was just a drab row of appliances stacked next to each other, adjoining an alcove where a combination washer/dryer sat, visible to the rest of the apartment.

Finding the perfect apartment in New York, for a reasonable price, is no easy task. When soon-to-be parents Fabio and Melina decided to upgrade from their one-bedroom rental, finding an acceptable two-bedroom place within their budget turned out to be quite a challenge. Finally they found a place that fit the bill: two bedrooms, great location, and at a price they could afford. The apartment, which hadn’t been updated in 40 years, was less than perfect. But this couple saw potential.

When Dana and David bought their home, it had wonky oak builder-grade cabinets in the kitchen, dingy wall paint, and — perhaps most importantly — a lot of shades of yellow. The previous owners were going for “hacienda” and the pseudo-Spanish style just wasn’t working for its new residents. All the other rooms in the house were updated first, and the kitchen was the last one standing — mainly because Dana and David knew it was a BIG job.

There are basically three different ways to get cabinets into your kitchen. You can have them custom-built to fit the space. This is very expensive. You can get pre-made cabinets delivered, already assembled, and install them yourself (or have a contractor do it for you). This is less expensive. Or you can order ready-to-assemble (RTA) kitchen cabinets, and assemble them yourself. This is the most budget-friendly option of all.

Eighties design is a fascinating subject of study because of the peculiar arc it’s taken recently: from despised and reviled to avant-garde cool, all within the space of a very short period of time. But with all the love for Memphis and weird ’80s graphics, there’s one particular aspect of this design era I haven’t heard much about: the ’80s kitchen. Is it as terrible as we remember? Has the time for a renaissance finally come? Let’s take a look.

This kitchen had issues, to say the least. We’ll gloss over the linoleum floor (not horrible, but not great) and the counter top, which sagged where it shouldn’t (never a good thing when you need a functional surface). Instead, we’re going to jump right on over to the stove, which had to be plugged in with an extension cord! Combine that with a fridge that was eating up floor space, and you know it’s time to rethink the kitchen layout.

The designer of this renovation described the kitchen before as, “dark, oddly angled and with what looks like fast food restaurant tile on the floor.” The client wanted to brighten and update the kitchen while making sure that it fit in perfectly with the rest of the 100-year-old home. The results are fresh and airy yet utterly classic, and the brand-new kitchen has achieved the dream: it looks like it’s always been there.

Every little bit helps.

I can get behind a design trend just as fast as the next person. Exposed brick? Sliding barn doors? Reclaimed wood? Check, check, and check! I dream of a farmhouse sink and a subway tile backsplash and am about to do the all-open-shelving thing in our kitchen. But there’s one seemingly mandatory design decision that I have zero interest in making: adopting the open kitchen. In our 1890 home, the kitchen is at the back of the house in a textbook-style late-Victorian floor plan.

Jennifer’s new house was definitely move-in ready, but she was still eager to make some key changes to better suit her style, and quickly put all her collected Pinterest inspiration to good use. We featured her bathroom renovation already, and today it’s all about the changes she made to the kitchen. Again, the old kitchen wasn’t horrific, but it wasn’t ideal either.

This kitchen is great on paper — granite countertops! Stainless steel appliances! But in reality, it didn’t suit the homeowner at all. In just weeks, the kitchen went from black, tan, yellow, and brown to . . . well, you’ll just have to see! Wow! We see so many whitewashed renovations —which I always love, to commenters chagrin —so it’s fun to see a room that’s been redone in bright white and a bold, unusual color.

Hannah was stuck in an impasse familiar to many of us: “For the seven years we’ve been in the house, I’ve always wanted to change the kitchen but thought it would have to be a massive, expensive project that would leave us without a working kitchen for months.” When she finally decided to tackle the room, she did it in stages with creative budgeting and a strong DIY spirit —all of which made the renovation much more approachable than originally predicted.

I think the best word to describe the “before” condition of this kitchen would be: ew. Discolored black and white floor tile, sad sagging laminate cabinets, perma-stained countertops, and a fluorescent light fixture like something out of a ’70s municipal building. Again, ew. And then there was the exposed exhaust hose sealed with duct tape. This kitchen was more than overdue for a change. Much better, yes?

When Kiersten bought her home, the kitchen had been recently renovation. It wasn’t exactly her taste, but it was….fine. She debated keeping it as is for awhile, and just making do, but then she started having some issues with the cabinets…. The kitchen looked fine, but only from a distance. In reality, the wooden cabinets had been painted white — without getting sanded or primed first — and the paint was peeling off in sections.

It pains me to say anything negative about a room containing so much gorgeous wood, so I’ll just say this: while this old kitchen had its charms, the new one is bold, spacious, and totally user-friendly. So different! This major undertaking was the vision—and partially the handiwork—of Lovebergs At Home. The wall-to-wall wood has been replaced with bright white upper cabinetry and dramatic black lower drawers, slate floor, quartz countertops, and island.

Lindsay and Tim’s New York apartment had a lot going for it: 9 foot ceilings, windows on three sides, a plum location on Central Park West, and a very spacious (for New York) footprint of 1,500 square feet. The layout, however, left a little bit to be desired. The main area was split between a living room and a rather unnecessarily large dining room, while the kitchen was completely separated from the living space.

This project is a great example of how a few dollars and a few minutes can make a dramatic change in your home—and your mood. As Anne described her situation, “Cooking and baking make me happy, but seeing my workspace sulking in the shadows was putting a damper on my spirit.” Let’s see her cheap, quick, renter-friendly, and reversible solution to the baking blues! So much better!

Not only did this kitchen receive a major aesthetic upgrade, the project achieved the Holy Grail of renovation dreams. In the words of the condo owner, “Same footprint, more space.” Hashtag goals indeed. So elegant! Malcolm Simmons of Mas Means More did such a fantastic job on this project. Is it strange that my favorite part is the cupboard above the refrigerator? It elongates the fridge and adds grace to a necessary appliance.

A family of four—including a former professional chef—made the most of this kitchen for four years, but they were eventually able to totally transform the room. Farewell to the “sparkly purple laminate countertops and faded store-bought cabinets” and hello to a gorgeous new gathering space that’s perfect for cooking. Impressed, but confused?

What’s the solution to two competing patterns of speckled stone in a kitchen? Sometimes the answer is a third, completely different material…. Argh, it’s like a beautiful jewel box! That pantry on the left is my new favorite room ever. And the unique arrangement of the hanging cabinets—is that middle one an ingeniously disguised range hood?—is so graceful, the marble walls are pure luxury, and that wonderful blue brings out such interesting hues in the marble.

This kitchen looked pretty good! It was cute and has charm—but it had hidden issues that were driving its owner batty. Let’s see how far $3,500 went in refreshing this sweet space. Before we gaze upon the new kitchen, here’s how reader Alisha described the old one: The kitchen in our townhouse was adequate when we moved in 2+ years ago, but every day it grew more tired.

Anyone who’s ever done a renovation on a budget knows that you have to find places to cut costs. Everything can’t be a splurge, after all. When my husband and I redid our home’s third floor to make it a full-time Airbnb, we were starting from scratch, so expensive things like HVAC systems ripped huge chunks out of our budget. I knew we had to restore the gorgeous original wood floors, and that meant another big expense.

Today, Mel (a designer) and Mario (a filmmaker) live in a stunning Spanish apartment they own, having spent the last few years slowly decorating the space to be an open, airy and warm home for themselves and their baby daughter Mia (as well as pups Coco and Marni). But it didn’t always look this good. In fact, this 1950s apartment had NEVER been renovated before.

If you’re looking at kitchens that were designed in the last few years, you’ll notice a definite trend towards undermount sinks. It’s easy to see why they’re popular: having a sink that attaches to the underside of the countertop, rather than sitting on the top, makes for a clean, minimal look. And you can brush crumbs directly into the sink, which is nice.

Kitchen renovations are basically one long series of compromises. Stumble upon a Ferrari red Bertazzoni range at half price? Obviously you have to slash the budget elsewhere (many elsewheres) to make that the star of the new kitchen. More often than not, these compromises are focused on the savings and not the splurging. Those splurges are oh-so-tempting, though, and wait for you around every corner—and on every Pinterest or Instagram refresh.

Ursula’s new condo in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood came with a builder-basic kitchen that seemed trapped in the ’90s, and a dark color scheme in the living room that, while stylish, made the space feel heavy and dark. Her goals for the renovation were two-fold: to modernize the kitchen, and brighten the entire space to emphasize its natural lighting and generous proportions. So out went the dark, heavy wood cabinets, replaced by streamlined modern ones in a glossy white.

This kitchen is perfectly nice! It’s got lots of windows, a beautiful hardwood floor, and classic cabinets. Its owner, however, wanted something beyond perfectly nice, and, after four years of plotting and planning, made it into something special. In the full-length shot, you can see that lovely floor, as well as more of the mustard walls.

Peggy Wang, Buzzfeed’s founding editor, decided one day a few years ago she was ready to move out of tiny apartment living. “It was like a weird sudden existential outburst in my usual lazy put-everything-off-forever mindset,” she writes. When she purchased this 1100-square-foot home in Queens, it felt like the right fit. But boy it needed a face lift. She worked closely with White Arrow—Keren Richter and her husband Thomas Richter—to remodel this home.

This kitchen had a lot of cozy charm, but it wasn’t very user-friendly. After five months of DIY renovations, it’s now bright, spacious, and totally made for cooking. It’s hard to believe this is the same amount of space! While the old kitchen felt claustrophobic, the new one is roomy and airy, yet it appears to boast about the same amount of storage space. Rachel Klein of The Northern Current is the powerhouse behind this renovation, and she did a bang-up job.

If you're looking for something warm and classic, and not too crazy, try this perfect cabinet color.

When you’re dealing with a small space, very minimal designs are usually the preferred choice (or so the thinking goes). But when Nancy decided to remodel her Upper East Side studio, she made some bold choices in the tiny six-foot-wide kitchen—things that you might not expect in a room this size, but that give this little space a character all its own. Previously, the kitchen was a bit of a blank slate.

After living in Brooklyn for awhile, architect Niraya and civil engineer Humberto wanted to bring that “loft” style to Miami, where they currently live. After hunting for a townhouse to buy, they found this home, which was actually used as the manager’s quarters of a Marriott Hotel in the ’70s and ’80s. And boy did it look like it was still in the ’70s and ’80s.

Painting your cabinets is one of the most transformative and inexpensive ways to upgrade your kitchen. But to do it right, there’s the sanding, priming, more sanding, and painting. No doubt, it’s a lot of work. Turns out chalk paint lets you skip over many of those steps so you can get straight to the new color, even if that new color is just a fresh coat of bright clean white.

We’ve written before about kitchens with green cabinets, and blue cabinets, and black cabinets, and those are all lovely, but this post is dedicated to a particular favorite of mine: gray cabinets. Whether you’re looking for a pearl gray or a seal gray or a dark almost-charcoal gray, this color has a timeless allure, and suits practically any space. Here are five reasons why this style is here to stay.

One of our freelancers, Ashley Poskin, owns a beautiful old house in small-town Illinois. She recently moved with her husband and daughter to Chicago for job-related reasons, and needed to put their home on the market. There was just one thing holding them back: the kitchen. Although they upgraded a few things over the years they lived there (new subway tile backsplash, some black chalkboard paint) the room still wasn’t a huge selling point.

We just revealed our most recent original makeover —this time a budget kitchen renovation in a small town in Illinois. If you missed the full kitchen reveal, head over to see all the before and after shots. We wound up spending under $6,000 from head to toe, soup to nuts, which we’re feeling pretty good about, especially given that the house sold less a week (four days) after we shot the final kitchen.

We’ve had a kitchen renovation in the works for months upon months now, and I’m just getting final photos back, but couldn’t resist sharing this one corner over the weekend. The kitchen before was totally adorable—part of an old house in small town Illinois, owned by one of our freelancers, Ashley Poskin. It had tons of vintage character and charm, but needed a bit of an update, especially because she planned to put it on the market to sell.

Where exactly is the kitchen, you ask? Why, it’s behind that grey dividing wall. And while the room’s cabinetry and other surfaces were very nice, this home’s new owner found the kitchen to be “small and closed-off.” It was perhaps the most closed-off kitchen in the history of our renovation posts.

I thought the simple and affordable bed hack in Erica Massey’s Dallas, Texas rental apartment was pretty brilliant. A tall bed with storage for her, and a cozy and cool spot to call his own for her dog Deacon. The fact that most of the components were sourced from IKEA for not a lot of money is the cherry on top. But that’s not the only smart IKEA hack in her home! One IKEA trip and less than $200 later and Erica was able to nearly double the storage space of her kitchen.

This kitchen was super cozy and sun-soaked, and it boasted an ample and intriguing island/peninsula hybrid—pretty sure that’s what an isthmus is—but it had a few shortcomings: The finishings were getting worn, and the freezer was a full 70 years old. Now it’s light and airy, and full of personal charm and quirky objects. Reader Catherine S. Vodrey of OutspokenWomen.

Years ago most kitchens were dark and full of autumn tones, like red, gold, and even orange. More recently, those bolder shades have given way to all-white kitchens. Why? Homeowners are building and renovating kitchens to be open to the rest of the floorplan, rather than segmented. “Kitchens have basically become invisible to blend with the rest of the home.

Nothing screams ‘Sad Kitchen’ like shoddy old countertops. Okay, a bad floor or rickety old cabinets are probably right up there, but a decades-old, grungy, cracked, and damaged counter can turn an otherwise perfectly decent kitchen into something to cringe over. When my husband and I prepared to put our previous home on the market, our realtor encouraged us to replace the dated laminate counter.

Let’s be real: This about-to-be-renovated kitchen is far nicer than any kitchen I’ve ever had, so much so that I kept putting ‘after’ labels on the ‘before’ photos. But now it has a fresh vibe, new appliances, and a radically different look. After all the before/after confusion, I still had to double-check that this was the same view as the top image. It is the same camera angle, but every other thing has been changed.

This is a very straightforward, efficient kitchen that looks exactly like at least three kitchens that I’ve been in. But it had a few issues that needed to be remedied (starting with secretly leaking pipes). Reader Ellen McCormick was kind enough to submit her project and give an in-depth description of the challenges this kitchen presented: Before the remodel the kitchen completely lacked character and function.

This is a nice big kitchen with tons of storage, lots of natural light, many ovens, and a cute baby blue and tan color scheme. However, it had some issues and some awkwardness that its owner was determined to rectify.

This St. Paul, Minnesota, kitchen was large, sunny, and full of storage, but its owners wanted something new and bold. With the help of a thoughtful designer, they now have the kitchen of their dreams. Kassina Falstad of OlliePop Design is responsible for this renovation; here she describes the company’s approach and this project in particular: Our motto is love your house for less, as we believe everyone can afford great design.

Chip and Jo’s designs are nothing if not, well, a little expected. At least, that’s what I had convinced myself of. Having been an avid watcher of the beloved Texan renovating duo for the first few seasons, I admit that seeing the same white kitchen with the same white subway tile and the same distressed decor got pretty tired pretty fast. So, I tuned out and assumed their style stayed back in 2015—along with my interest.

Reader Kate refers to the purchase of this apartment as “When the Only Good Thing Is the Layout.” After several months of renovation—and plenty of NYC red tape—this home is now living up to its full potential. This is so glam. I love the glimpses of the bedroom and kitchen through the screens of the balustrading, the deep duo-tone wood railings, the rich wood floors, the boutique hotel feel of the bedroom, and the entire vibe.