Emily Henderson's Tip When Choosing The Right Kitchen Paint In An Open-Concept Space

Choosing paint colors for your kitchen can be thrilling — so many options! It can also feel completely overwhelming — so many options! Luckily, there are guardrails to help guide your decision. You want colors you love and that will achieve the aesthetic you want. You may already have elements to match, like appliances and countertops. But there's one more vital factor you might not be thinking of that will shape your paint pick: whether your kitchen is open concept and how it will play along with the rest of the space around it.

Take advice from stylist and blogger Emily Henderson and think of selecting your kitchen paint color like putting together an outfit. You want harmony between the kitchen and all the rooms you can see from it just as you would with your top, bottom, jacket, shoes, and so on. "Make sure you like how [the colors] look next to each other because you see them at the same time," Henderson recommends on her blog. She explains, "You don't want the colors to be, A, too close that they look like they are slightly off or, B, look like a funhouse (in a bad way)." 

This by no means requires painting all rooms the same color or feeling bound to boring white. But it does mean thinking about all the colors you'll see at once, which you can easily do by placing swatches next to one another.

The first thing to ask yourself is whether you'd be willing to repaint other rooms surrounding the kitchen — if you're not planning to already. If so, you could choose any dream kitchen color and adjust the other rooms accordingly. More realistically, you're just updating your kitchen. So nail down a loose palette to play within. There's a wide range of neutral colors that keep kitchens on trend yet timeless. If the living room you can see from your kitchen is, say, greige or ecru, you can't go wrong painting the kitchen cream or clay. You can even embrace quieter tones of color-pop shades, like sage green, icy blue, or dusty rose. 

Layering white and beige paint shades makes kitchens feel elegant, and this will complement just about any color scheme in adjacent living or dining areas. Bursts of color are one of the best ways to inject your kitchen with personality, but just consider what those colors could be up against in an open-concept space. You may have your heart set on a deep forest green for your kitchen, but if your dining area is already rich garnet, you could end up with a Christmas-themed-restaurant vibe. Instead, stick to cream and apply complementary, high-impact colors to cabinets and trims, like terracotta, coral, teal, or olive green. Always test swatches first, and stand in different spots of your kitchen to imagine how its color could look against those of the other rooms you see.