Bold is beautiful, and kitchen designers and homeowners agree: Interest in daring kitchen color choices such as avocado green and millennial pink is on the rise. Although white remains a fan-favorite for most homeowners according to the 2020 Houzz Kitchen Trends Report, searches for unique color choices are way up, and shades such as emerald and turquoise are making their rounds in high-end, custom kitchens. Going bold is risky, however, especially if designers integrate the color into countertops and cabinetry: Make a wrong move, and you could be out thousands of dollars and stuck with a bubblegum-colored countertops when you were going for a millennial pink shade.
Remember your grandmother’s avocado-green kitchen? It could soon be yours. Or maybe it’ll be pink, mauve, emerald green or buttercup. Anything but white, because the revolt against the white kitchen has begun.
Last November, the cover of Elle Decor featured a Steven Gambrel-designed kitchen awash in a shiny turquoise — even the ceiling gleamed like an iridescent underwater wonderland. On Pinterest between November 2018 and November 2019, searches for dark green cabinets jumped 367 percent, plum kitchens went up 107 percent and pink kitchen walls spiked 121 percent.
For decades now, cabinets have been relegated to white, brown or maybe black, and it’s been even longer since appliances were allowed to be anything but stainless steel. But the Instagram kitchen — invariably a clean backdrop of basic Shaker cabinets, simple subway backsplashes and marble countertops — finally has some competition.
Jenny Dina Kirschner, an interior designer in New York, recently painted the cabinets pink for a client in Long Island, giving the room a decidedly ’80s vibe somewhere between mauve and millennial pink. The color picked up the pinkish tones in the Calacatta Vagli marble countertop.
