7 paint colors worth trying in your kitchen - Kitchen Colors

Whether you’re looking for a bold shade or a muted hue, these colors will get your kitchen cooking

January 21, 2025

By Kathryn O'Shea-Evans

If you find selecting a paint color for the kitchen more intimidating than a Ferran Adrià recipe, you’re not alone. Many of us “feel paralyzed because a kitchen can feel so much more permanent than a living room in terms of how they use color,” said Laura Tribbett, a designer in Chicago. “A lot of people design for resale, thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t go so crazy with a bold color on my cabinet — because what will this next person think?’”

Tribbett's advice: Do what tastes right to you (rather like salting a dish)."Someone once told me, 'If you go so neutral in the hopes of offending nobody, you're going to excite nobody.' So I think just have fun.

"If you opt for a more vibrant kitchen paint color, just make sure it's balanced in other ways, she said. "If you have a colorful cabinet, maybe you go more neutral on the backsplash."

We asked professional decorators for their favorite kitchen paint colors. Here are their picks, including some honeyed tones - and others with decidedly more aesthetic umami.

Benjamin Moore Boreal Forest

Tribbett revamped the existing buttercream-finish on the cabinets in a country home in Barrington, Illinois, by painting them Benjamin Moore's Boreal Forest. "That one took a little while to land on," she said, in part because of the slate floors and William Morris wall-covering. "I kind of told [my client] we had to lean in, and Boreal Forest had the right combination of bluey green that kind of bridged all of the different materials that we had going on in that space."