Please help me choose paint colours for my kitchen

[abgirl]

We have a new kitchen arriving on 1st, which will be cream gloss units with oak work tops. It is a galley kitchen and is quite cold and dark. I had been thinking kind of cappucino, with choc brown tiles, then DH came home today and suggested red.

Would really appreciate some ideas please - the rest of the house is fairly neutral creams, browns and greens.

what about a terracotta colour for the walls and a creamy colour for the ceiling. a green plant or two in a morroccan style pot (brown/green/cream/etc) will draw in some of the colours in the rest of the house that way.

I love red but it's my favourite colour, so biased - there's one called Toffee Apple (Dulux?) which looks nice. Or a sage-y green? We had Bamboo Leaf (I think - Crown maybe?) in our last kitchen and it was lovely. Or one called something like Perfect Olive/Just Olive gets recommended on here quite a lot. I thought I wanted mid-brown for our small, dark bathroom but actually didn't like it when I did a test bit - might be worth trying a few out.

I think it is a crown one called Box Tree or maybe Dulux - we had it in our old house - everyone commented on what a great colour it was.

either a really nice pale mint green or a baby pink colour

forget dirty brown cappuchino crap colours, you need clean modern colours

Don't rule out red! A nice cherry deep scarlet red, (NOT burgundy type red, but a Hollywood 40's lips red) carefully chosen, could work well (depends on the lighting in your kitchen though).

As the units are cream the red would not dominate too much, and red is a natural partner of nude/beige (as in the oak tops). I think most shades of cappucino are dreary and old fashioned TBH and a pop of colour is much fresher and more modern.

Also, your cappucino colour would have to not clash with the oak, and as oak is generally a warm neutral shade, your cappucino neutral could look mushroom-y and greyish next to it and clash badly.

If you have spotlights and a decent amount of natural light then red would be ok. You could do a feature wall and paint the other walls cream (matched to the cupboards).

If red's really not your thing, but you want to consider colour, a sagey spring green (hard to describe but sort of Granny Smith apple colour, but slightly more muted) would also be nice.

Open these links - perfect for this!

red
green - ignore the tangerine bit!

Ok, I like this a lot - maybe the best of them all - neutral!

You can play around with the colours on this website yourself, it's a really cool feature

PS Bear in mind the picture shows a black worktop, if you blank this out and imagine the table as the worktop it will be more realistic for your kitchen.

Ooooh, thanks for the website links, will definitely be having a play on there.

Do like greens but we have olive green in the hall, which is the only room that links into the kitchen so am worried about it either looking the same, or clashing if we choose a different shade.

Not sure the room is light enough to take red on all the walls, though the plan is to have some spotlight type lighting. Do quite like signal red on the dulux site, was that the kind of red people were thinking of? or this looks good too: www.crownpaints.co.uk/colour/602/red-carpet.htm

Thanks for the ideas so far, please keep them coming...

Just had new kitchen in cream with oak worktops. We have a nice fresh clean sort of podwer blue - a bit like the blue on these thread name/time tabs. Have some happy multi coloured polka dot and gingham things in there which liven it up too.

Agree with overmydeadbody: avoid browns/creams I would say - will make all your galley blend into one non-descript sort of place.

Red is lovely but in my experience shrinks the space. I have had a pale peppermint green room - made the room feel really cold and uninviting. I this greens with more yellow than blue in them are better, thickerand therefore warmer somehow.