Well that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you choose your cabinet color first. Then that immediately curates your countertop colors because now your choices are a lot more slim. But if you don’t know which countertop to install, it’s not going to get easier when you choose the cabinet color because once you finally decide what it is, you don’t want to be stuck to a cabinet color that may or may not work with your countertop so this is how you do it.
I was recently in a client’s home and when I got there, because I was there to help her choose her kitchen finishes, she had her countertop and her backsplash and everything was just laid out flat on her chocolate-brown dining table so there is the first mistake.
Because you can’t see color when it’s all just laid out flat like that. So the first thing you want to do is lay your finishes exactly how they’re going to be when you install them. So here I’ve got just a medium brown hardwood floor this is Calacatta Novo with Caesarstone and this is Misty Carrara right here.
So what you do is you lay them down because now the countertop is going to be horizontal along with the floor, right? Let’s do our potential cabinet colors first. So then you plunk them up and what I usually do is I just turn around whatever sample I happen to have.
You can see that I’ve got an off-white wall here but just so that you’re always creating a clean backdrop with your samples. You can use any poster board for this but if you’re using my large color samples, that’s the easiest way to just instantly create like a clean backdrop.
Okay so then I’ve got a white, true white and an off-white here and this is [Benjamin Moore] Chantilly Lace and this is [Benjamin Moore] White Dove and then the next thing you want to do … this is a really good tip… Most big-box stores sell white, off-white, and cream subway tile. These are really great control tiles to have with you, especially if you’re a designer and you are helping your clients choose tiles.
Because immediately, you can start to see if you’re dealing with a true white tile or an off-white tile or a cream tile because you’ve got the ones that you know are that color, because there’s so many tiles that are just greige, so how do you know that they’re gray? Well you compare them to your control tiles, which is what I have here okay this is my true white backsplash tile here and then I’ve got my off-white backsplash tile here and then you can start to see which one is right.
Now, can I do a true white over here with Calcutta Novo well Calcutta Novo is actually a little bit greige and so if you had decided that okay, I’m just going to go with true white because that’s got to go with their most things, right? And then later you decided that Calcutta Novo was the best countertop choice.
You could not go with Chantilly Lace because Calcutta Novo is actually greige and taupe. Taupe actually looks really good with it. So let’s just walk through what my client was considering when I got to her house.
So when I got to her house she had chosen taupe LVP flooring (luxury vinyl plank flooring). I don’t have any taupe flooring here but I’m just gonna use this [Benjamin Moore] Ranchwood sample because it is identical to the LVP that she was considering.
So let’s put that down here and then so Calcutta Novo, you can see actually has this taupe actually has some nice taupe veins on it so if you plunk that down, it matches great. Now how do I know that this is greige? Well, when I put my cream sample right next to it, it’s too yellow and that’s how you know that cream is not actually the correct way to go at all.
So, basically you’re in the world of off-white or you would choose just a lighter, greige color perhaps for the cabinets so that would tie in with that color. However, she was considering [Benjamin Moore] Collingwood she had a true white backsplash tile and Collingwood was the color that she was considering for her cabinets because she’d seen it in a celebrity designer’s kitchen.
Well when I placed them all together like this, I said, “You know, if you go this route it’s all really greige now. You’ve got like a you know gray feeling taupe-y floor. Now you’re going to Collingwood, which is a bit of a purple gray, for your cabinets.
You know your whole kitchen is going to feel greige.” You know it’s 2020 right now and gray is already dated now that the black and white trend is here so in this celebrity designer’s kitchen she had this countertop but she had this great classic and timeless medium brown floor so Collingwood worked great because it created this balance of warm and cool and that’s what you want to do when you’re choosing colors, is that you don’t want everything to be cool or everything to be warm.
You want to create a balance of warm and cool and so if you’re going to copy someone else’s kitchen make sure you’re actually copying the kitchen almost identically or you’re just not going to end up with the same results and you’re going to be disappointed.
So always choose your countertop first because everything flows from there and if you need some help choosing your countertop or any of your kitchen finishes, I can help through my eDesign department. You’ll be very happy with the results when you follow these useful guidelines on how to choose kitchen remodel colors.
We’ve got kitchen packages and you can even just buy a countertop package or cabinet package if you want to. So I hope that helps. Please post your comments below!