While contemporary kitchen design has been veering away from the monochromatic white kitchen look, we see more appearances of heavily black kitchens, with small accents of slate grey and wood. The kitchen island looks Scandinavian in design with angular metal legs and flat wood stools and it reinforces the minimalist look while the black makes it elegant.
This kitchen is an entire look ceiling to floor. The kitchen cabinets are two-tone cabinets of charcoal and natural wood grain, which is echoed in the island counter. The white countertop with the kitchen sink is echoed with the white walls and ceiling and the cabinet countertop. The barstools and the track lighting overhead is dark like the charcoal colored cabinet, tying everything in the kitchen together.
Contemporary kitchens do not always mean eliminating texture from the design. Here, we see a kitchen working with an existing brick wall with a shiny onyx black kitchen counter and set of cabinets. The lighting behind the onyx cabinet drawers and the black kitchen sink highlights both surfaces in a striking, bold yet simple look.
The mixture of dark wood and metal is remain a staple on contemporary kitchen designs, but it’s hard to ignore the practical and clever built-in appliance of the mini-refrigerator that serves as a chilled wine rack. Also notable is that the island counter works as an eating space, not just a kitchen prep space, so this is perfect as a space saving solution that does not require a separate dining room area.
Despite the classic appearance of this kitchen, this has the hallmarks of contemporary design with the two-tone frameless cabinet drawers, which are made more classic with the antique gold handles and knobs on the darker cabinets and silver handles on the white cabinet doors and drawers. The silver matches with the ovens on the right and the gold matches the kitchen sink faucet o the left.
This kitchen chose to keep their cabinet minimal by eliminating extra handles or knobs from their cabinet doors and drawers. Handleless cabinets are becoming more popular and they are identified by the two-inch gap between the upper and lower drawers, allowing the user to open using the frame of the cabinet itself as a handle rather than a separate affixed handle on the doors and drawers.
Many of these contemporary kitchens seem to have a pattern where they decorate the island counter to resemble a bar space, complete with bar stools and even overhead lighting as the light source of the room. This kitchen sticks to the neutral colors, white black, brown and silver for the kitchen sink and the lighting fixtures.
This kitchen is centered on its square and rectangle motif, replicated in several areas of the kitchen from the windows, to the raised panel designs on the cabinet doors, to even the structure of the golden frames of the stools. However, with the additional of the extra stools on the side of the countertop, they are treating this island counter more like a dining room space.
This kitchen island counter looks like it can be at home in both a bar setting and a kitchen, sticking only to a corkwood color and black to go along with an integrated appliance of a stovetop range. It’s noteworthy that from this distance, the barstools look like champagne corks.
This fresh kitchen design makes the most use of a cozy apartment kitchen, expanding the counterspace by forming it into a “T” at the end and then adding lights overhead, at the side of the counter and glow beneath the counter next to the white barstools. By keeping the kitchen to its neutrals of black, white and silver, it makes the illumination pop out even more. This kitchen is very reminiscent of the movie “Tron” for those who like a science-fiction look to their kitchen.
This kitchen encompasses the whole space completely by doing something few people think of; using the same wood surfacing for the floor and the cabinet doors and drawers! This look is augmented by black lines and surfaces that draw even more attention to the wood grain and handleless drawers that keep the entire space minimalist. The black ovens and range are integrated into this overall chic design.
This fresh kitchen takes advantage of its white glossy surfaces to the overhead recessed can lighting, giving the whole room a bright showroom look. The wall mounted cabinets have their own version of diagonal symmetry that is not the standard rectangular look of most cabinets. For those who want to do their own lighting design pattern on their ceilings, Best Online Cabinets has a detailed DIY video here to attain this look! (add link)
This all-natural materials kitchen design, full of walnut wood and dark stone has an austere, almost gothic appearance, showing that a fresh kitchen does not always have to mean bright. This sophisticated kitchen looks right at home with the Addams family without copying their exact aesthetic. The very large kitchen island counter is perfect for large food preparation or a substitution for a dining space.
This kitchen design has a U-shaped counter with a lot of seating places, similar to being in a bar that also serves as a casual hangout. It also shows that if you are working with wood, the woods on the floor do not have to match the paneling on the counter or the cabinet doors, whether in grain or in tone. The silver in the appliances is echoed in the barstools. At this point, we have to wonder how many kitchen designs are really our secret wishes to have a bar in our house.
Wanted to draw attention to this kitchen because of the primary color used: Navy blue, which is a trending color in kitchens and is a nice hue for those who like dark kitchens, but do not want them black. This is an interesting variant two-tone cabinet kitchen design where the darker color is more prevalent than the white color (you can see the white cabinets on the upper right of the picture as the only white cabinets. This color is also called “Tardis blue” named after the dark blue color of the phone booth in the popular series “Doctor Who” (add link to the Doctor Who reference? From another article?)
This kitchen is best summed up in three words: Black, brick and industrial. Usually, the trend of industrial looking kitchens is paired with reclaimed wood and lighter colored metallic surfaces, but we have seen more industrial kitchens with a brick wall or brick backsplash along with dark or black surfaces. The fixtures and appliances are also black to match the rest of the aesthetic. This trend is called the “smokestack kitchen” marked by: industrial look, incorporation brick or concrete into the design, and dark/black furniture and appliances.
Here in this kitchen design, we have a beautifully marbled island countertop that also tops the dark grey raised paneled base cabinets. If you notice, every surface as a tone of grey in it, whether it is the dark grey of the cabinets, the light grey of the counters or even the silver of the appliances and the base of the barstools. The overhead lights help illuminate this normally dark room.
The nice part about designing your dream kitchen is that you can incorporate several different elements from the various kitchens that you see. This is a bright kitchen full of greys, a gloss surface cabinet, overhead recessed light, a brick backsplash and a large island counter, like a summary of elements of all of the other kitchen design that we have observed thus far.
It seems like every interior kitchen has to have an island counter, but here this one of the few times where we substitute a dining room table in the kitchen. This is a great creative design solution if you are limited in space, combining the dining room surface in lieu of an island kitchen counter. The lights mounted beneath the open shelving add to the drop lights on the ceiling and above the dining room table to brighten an otherwise dark room.
If you want to go big, this is the largest kitchen we could find that has the contemporary kitchen design. The whole place is full of different textures of brown, whether brown wood paneling of the cabinets, to the lighter brown of the wood floor and the various shades of brown and grey for the stone work on the wall.
For more kitchen design ideas, click here for the Best Online Cabinets collection of ideas!
