Kitchen

Most eclectic kitchens fall apart at the countertop. Not at the tile, not the art, not the flea-market pendant — at the counter, the surface nobody plans and the one carrying the entire mix. The nine ideas below assume you want the collected version rather than the yard-sale one: a palette with rules, two tile … Read more

Off-white is the safest cabinet colour in America and the easiest one to get wrong. The gap between a kitchen that reads warm and one that reads grubby usually comes down to three decisions: which off-white, what sits next to it, and what light hits it after dark. Everything below is one of those decisions, … Read more

Moving a kitchen sink four feet down the wall means opening the floor, rerouting the drain, and re-sloping it at the quarter inch per foot the code wants. That one move routinely costs more than every cabinet door in the room, and nobody who walks into the finished kitchen can tell it happened. So the … Read more

A standard apartment galley gives you eight to ten linear feet of counter, and about a third of it is gone before you cook anything: the microwave, the knife block, the drying rack, the coffee setup that has quietly annexed the corner by the outlet. Every idea below is aimed at that surface, either by … Read more

Unlacquered brass is warm and gold. Most of the sage green currently on the shelf is neither, and that single mismatch is why so many of these kitchens photograph beautifully and then look faintly grey in person. The nine decisions below start with the undertone problem and work outward through the pulls, the faucet, the … Read more

Kitchen color goes wrong at the paint counter, under fluorescent tubes, from a chip the size of a business card. Nothing chosen there survives contact with your own light. The thirteen ideas below are grouped by where the color goes rather than by which shade is having a moment, because the decision that matters is … Read more

Most light kitchens fail after dark. The cabinets read crisp at eleven in the morning, then go grey under the recessed cans or amber under the pendants, and everyone blames the paint when the problem is the bulb, the countertop, or an undertone nobody checked against anything. What follows are seven directions for light colored … Read more

Most advice on elegant kitchens reads like a shopping list: marble, a big island, brass everywhere, a range that costs as much as a car. That is a description of an expensive kitchen, not an elegant one. The kitchens that hold up are the ones where fewer materials are asked to do more work and … Read more

A kitchen finished entirely in white quartz, white walls and white handleless fronts photographs well at ten in the morning and turns clinical by eight at night, because nothing in the room holds warm light. Warm minimalism fixes that with about four materials, not with more objects on the counter. The ten decisions below are … Read more

Walk into any kitchen showroom and the island on the floor is 36 inches high with a 12-inch overhang and three backless stools tucked underneath. It photographs well and it seats nobody for longer than a bowl of cereal, which is the whole problem with treating a kitchen island with dining table as one surface. … Read more