The Kitchen Room journal

I have always believed that colour is the soul of a kitchen.

You can have the most beautifully made cabinets, the finest stone worktop, the most considered hardware. But get the colour wrong and something will always feel slightly off. Get it right and the whole room comes alive in a way that is difficult to articulate but impossible to miss.

It is the part of the design process I find most absorbing, and the part clients most often find most daunting. So I wanted to share how I actually think about it.

It starts with light, not with colour

This might sound counterintuitive, but when I begin a colour conversation with a client my first question is never which colours do you love. It is which way does your kitchen face.

Light is everything. The same shade of paint will behave completely differently in a north-facing kitchen than a south-facing one. A warm, creamy white that feels soft and enveloping in a room that gets afternoon sun can look flat and lifeless in a room that never sees direct light. A soft sage green that feels fresh and airy in a bright east-facing kitchen can feel heavy and unwelcoming somewhere darker.

This is why I always want to visit a space before we talk seriously about colour. I want to understand how the light moves through the room across the day, where the shadows fall, what the view from the window brings in. All of that shapes the colour conversation before we have even looked at a single swatch.

The colours I keep coming back to

If you visit our showroom you will notice something fairly quickly. I am drawn to pinks and greens, and I make no apology for it.

Not pinks that shout or greens that dominate. The ones that support. Soft, dusky pinks with a warmth that makes a kitchen feel genuinely welcoming. Greens rooted in the landscape, the kind that feel like they have always belonged in a Yorkshire home. Colours that work quietly in the background, letting the materials and the light do the talking, but that give a kitchen a character and a soul that a white or neutral simply cannot.

I find myself returning to these families again and again because they age so beautifully. A soft green or a muted pink looks richer and more considered after five years of living than it did on the day it was installed. The depth reveals itself slowly. That is the quality I am always looking for in a colour.

The difference between loving a colour and living with one

There is a real difference between a colour you love to look at and a colour you can live with every day for fifteen years.

The colours I trust most are the ones that have a certain quietness to them. They do not make the most dramatic first impression. They are the ones that still feel exactly right a decade later, that you walk into on an ordinary Tuesday morning and still find something to love.

Warm or cool, and why it matters

Every colour sits somewhere on a spectrum between warm and cool, and understanding which side a shade falls on makes an enormous difference to how it reads in a kitchen.

Warm whites and creams, those with yellow or pink undertones, bring softness and comfort. They work beautifully in kitchens that are the heart of a busy family home, spaces that need to feel welcoming and lived in.

Cool whites and off-whites, those with green or blue undertones, feel cleaner and more crisp. They suit kitchens with generous natural light where they can feel genuinely luminous.

The trap many people fall into is choosing a white or neutral without understanding its undertone, then wondering why it does not look the way they expected. Always look at a colour in your own light before committing. What you see in a showroom, or on a screen, or on a small paint card held at arm's length, is never quite what you will live with.

Our approach to colour

We work with a wide palette of painted finishes, carefully curated to offer the range and depth a kitchen deserves. Soft, nature-led greens. Warm, dusty pinks. Quiet off-whites with genuine character. Deeper, more expressive tones for those who want their kitchen to make a bolder statement without losing its elegance.

But we never stop there. If you have a colour in mind that feels deeply personal to your home, we will find a way to make it happen. We colour-match to Farrow and Ball and Little Greene as a matter of course, and we will happily explore beyond that too. Some of the most beautiful kitchens we have designed have been built around a colour a client brought to us from somewhere else entirely, a fabric, a flower, a memory of a room they once loved.

Colour should feel personal. Our job is to help you find the one that feels entirely, unmistakably yours.

A few questions worth sitting with

If you are beginning to think about colour for your kitchen, here are the questions I find most useful before looking at a single swatch.

How does the light move through your kitchen across the day, and what is the quality of that light? Is it warm and golden, or cool and bright?

What materials will the colour sit alongside? Stone, timber and brass all respond differently to warm and cool shades and finding a colour that honours those materials rather than competing with them makes an enormous difference.

How do you want the kitchen to feel? Calm and restorative? Warm and sociable? Quietly elegant? The feeling comes first. The colour follows.

And finally, can you imagine living with this colour on a quiet weekday morning as well as a bright sunny afternoon? If the answer is yes, you are probably on the right track.

Come and see the colours in person

The single most useful thing you can do when choosing a kitchen colour is to see it in real conditions, in a real kitchen, in real light.

Our showroom in Boroughbridge is designed exactly for this. You can see our painted finishes across different kitchen styles, watch how they shift as the Yorkshire light moves through the day, and talk through the options with me in a calm, unhurried setting.

Colour is personal and getting it right matters enormously. I am always happy to spend as much time on it as it takes.

Colour has a way of finding you. Trust the one that makes you feel at home.

Sam x