Kitchen Design Trends during the Pandemic

White Still Dominates

Trapped at home, the pandemic forced us all to turn our focus inward, to our lives at home.  Many of us threw ourselves into home renovations from large scale renovations to simple accent updates.  As long-term kitchen trend watchers, we’ve been interested to see how tastes have changed during these unusual times.  Fortunately, we also have hard data to report on that.  We are avid watchers of Houzz data trends.  Houzz reports the number of kitchens in its photo database.  We took a snapshot of that information in June 2020 at the start of the pandemic and again last month, January 2022, and compared the results.  We’ll share some highlights in this article and more in the weeks to come. 

First, white continues to dominate everywhere.  No surprise there, just maybe that it is still so strong and we’re showing no signs of tiring of it.   A few key white facts:

►  50% of kitchens have White cabinets.

►  52% of kitchens have White counters - certainly supported by the growth of versatile and easy maintenance engineered quartz.

►  40% of kitchens have White in their backsplash.

►  White isn’t this strong because it is low end.  In fact, white is used in 25% of low budget projects and 28% or higher budget projects. 

►  White softened by natural woods and raw materials continues to trend (think clean, serene, zen surroundings).

►  White accented with rich colors of black, deep blues, deep grays abound.

One of the reasons for White’s dominance is that is intersects all design styles.  Here is the penetration of white in the top five kitchen styles.   

Design Research tracks design trends from quantitative sources to enable you, our clients and friends, to keep a balanced eye on real design trends.  Other resources use anecdotal mechanisms to announce and describe “trends” but, in our experience, if those trends are based merely on a few examples or on observations at trade shows, they don’t hold much value to designers and product developers who need to provide products that fit today’s kitchens.  While that article on tropical design influences from Sunday’s lifestyle section might have been very motivating to your design team, the reality is that only a small fraction of kitchens had a tropical theme in the last 18 months.  While all creative influences have value, they need to be linked to and tempered by concrete real-world parameters of balance.  We bring such realistic temperament to all of the design-related research projects we conduct for you as well.  Please don’t hesitate to reach out to learn more today.  Let us explain how we integrate color and design into our research.  We’re the only research company with the expertise to do that. 

This was the first in a series of planned articles about design trends.  Let us know if there is a specific topic in design that you have questions on.  Please call or email us today:  609-896-1108 or Rick@Designres.com