Avoid Choosing Outdated Kitchen Remodeling Trends
A kitchen renovation is one of the most significant renovations you can make to your home. It is an expensive and labor-intensive project that can also yield considerable return on investment and enhancement on the daily lives of the family who live and work within it.
Make the Right Choice
Given the scope of a kitchen remodel, it’s a project that’s usually completed just once in the homeownership lifecycle. That’s why making the right design choices is critical. Trendy choice can quickly become outdated, tiresome, and incredibly expensive to correct.
Here are some things we recommend thinking twice about before making them the center of your kitchen renovation.
Stainless Steel
The gleaming hero of most kitchen renovations, particularly the more recent trend of black stainless steel, is definitely on its way out. While it may look incredibly chic when first installed, the difficulty in keeping the surface smudge- and fingerprint-free is proving to be less desirable for homeowners.
Instead, try paneled or hidden appliances for a fresh, easy-to-maintain design option for your new kitchen remodel.
Budget Tip: For big impact on a budget or renters on a mission to make a place their own, we suggest exploring the world of removable wallpaper for the (temporary) color or pattern pop kitchen remodeling needs.
Tiny Tile Backsplashes
In the last few years, it seems like all kinds of backsplashes have been trending. Tiny tiles photograph beautifully, adding a graduated color palette to a large portion of the kitchen workspace and creating a visual illusion of space. Unfortunately though, for a working kitchen, tiny tiles are a bad choice because all that grout requires particular attention for cleaning. If you’re remodeling your kitchen as a showpiece, go forth and use the tiny tiles, but if you’re intending to cook and clean efficiently in your newly remodeled kitchen, stick with the larger, more sponge friendly tile varieties.
And the same can be said for herringbone tile backsplashes, which, in addition to being hard to clean, are also much too busy for the small areas where they’re usually being used.
Industrial-Sized Fridges
While the appeal of vast amounts of cold storage space is easy to understand, the trend toward massive refrigerators is waning. It appears that extra large design has hit a point of diminishing return, where the largest appliances available are taking up more space in the kitchen than they’re worth. Instead, opt for smaller, energy efficient cooling units in strategic areas. This might include an ice machine built into a kitchen cabinet, a mini-fridge in the family room or home office, or a cooling unit in the linen closet for medicines.
Warm Metal Finishes
Rose gold and copper tones have recently been replaced by finishes like patinated brass, which coordinates nicely with other finishes that you may have in your kitchen like nickel and oil-rubbed bronze. These finishes are very low maintenance and stand the test of time. The same goes for matte-black hardware that has a low threshold for wear-and-tear. When you replace appliances in the future, they’re more likely to coordinate with brass, nickel, and bronze fixtures, so leave rose gold and copper for the less expensive decorative touches that are more easily replaceable.
All White Everything
White walls, white tiles, white countertops, and white furniture – muted, monochromatic kitchens lack character and depth. The all-white-everything design trend had a long moment, and anyone could have designer, luxurious appeal very easily. Insta-kitchens, anyone? Now, like other rooms of the house, design is moving toward a three-color design scheme, which allows for more timeless combinations, more dynamic wood finishes, more interesting marble colorations, and overall more visual interest for the most trafficked room of the house.
Farmhouse Appeal
The farmhouse trend has been overdone for every room of the house, but this year it’s over for kitchens especially. Think barn doors, butcher block countertops, hanging pot racks, and apron sinks. When farmhouse kitchens first appeared on the design scene, they signified a certain personality and character of the designer and owner. Over time, farmhouse design and decor has become a basic fallback approach for all kitchens, and therefore it communicates nothing about the family that uses the kitchen as its own. If you’re spending Tuscan-inspired kitchens experienced a similar wave of beautiful-to-basic in the previous decade.
Budget Tip: If a complete remodel is not in the cards, you can still make a big difference with smaller coordinated updates. Start with kitchen linens, cushions, and placemats/placeholders. Change out faux floral, switch mason jars for vases, remove generic artwork, and consider updating any countertop utensils or storage pieces, which you can find in a range of colors.
Heart and Home
Your kitchen is the heart(h) and home of the house, where your family gathers and where so many meaningful memories are made. Cultivate a kitchen design style that reflects your family, your personality, and what matters most to you. Don’t allow outdated trendy design lead you to renovate your kitchen to look like everyone else’s. Let yourself shine through and you’ll be right on trend with your kitchen remodel! Individuality and uniqueness never goes out of style.
Related Article: Upgrading Your Kitchen Cabinet with Glass-Pane Doors
Adapted from RISMedia.
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