Choosing a colour scheme

Sometimes inspiration is hard to find. In this case, it was looking at this picture that provided the 'Eureka moment' that drove the whole kitchen colour scheme.  As I was talking to the client about colours we looked towards this painting and it became immediately clear that this was what we should work with.

Here is the kitchen that resulted. It was made for clients in Liss, near Petersfield, Hampshire. You can see the picture in pride of place in the corner by the table (Artist: Veronica Seagren).

The walls are a simple off-white colour which enhances the bright and breezy feel of the place - blues can often feel cold, but in this case we’ve got enough light into the room, so it feels warm and bright.

Their previous kitchen was tiny, so we removed two walls and a door to open up the whole area, and replaced the floor from the hall, right through the kitchen into the back lobby area with an engineered oak floor which was finished with a hard wax oil, which is a natural hard wearing durable finish.

We also extended the length of the window by the table by about eight inches. On face value this seems to be an extremely expensive exercise, but it completely changed the aspect, allowing us to look down through the garden from just about any place in the kitchen and it was well worth the money spent on it.

When we knocked the walls out it was necessary to put a structural beam across the space to support the wall above in the bathroom. Fortunately the ceilings are extremely high in the property, so we were able to put in a suspended ceiling which completely concealed this new beam allowing for a single flat surface to run through the whole space. This is far preferable to having a beam hanging down into the room which would have interrupted the visual flow through the space.

We also changed the back door, formerly a solid door, to one with double-glazed panels. This along with making the window longer allowed much more light to come into the space which makes a huge difference.

We choose to use appliances that were on show. In this case they were stainless steel. There are a stainless steel fridge, oven and dishwasher. This was a deliberate choice, you’ll notice that we use stainless steel knobs and the butt hinges are also in stainless steel, so there is this theme running through the whole job.

The work surfaces either side of the tall cabinets that house the oven and fridge are in solid oak which work with the oak floor, all the other surfaces are 30mm granite.

When it comes to choosing granite, what we do is walk down the suppliers yard, with our colour swatches and materials and a sample of the things we’re using, such as the oak floor and just compare them against the slabs. What normally happens is that something sings to us as we’re walking round. Nine times out of ten it’s a very easy choice to make, as long as we have the materials with us as we’re looking.

We made the table with book-matched oak veneer, and had the cushions made to match the colour of the seating.

Notice the close-up of the dovetail joints, the traditional timber boxes. Our drawers have modern, state of the art runners, set below the box where you can’t see them. These drawers run extremely smoothly and suck themselves shut at the end of the stroke.

Often when trying to decide on a colour scheme, we chose the fabrics before we choose anything else. This is because it’s much easier to match paint to fabrics, rather than the other way around offering you much more choice in the long run.