What’s Hot & What’s Not

White is still the most popular color for kitchen cabinets, but black and dark gray are in pursuit. One of the theories floating around for this dip into darkness is that it’s a reaction to the glaring brightness we created in personal spaces during Covid lockdowns and isolation. More likely, it’s just time for one trend to end and another to begin.

For example, designers are adding secondary spaces in larger kitchens – such as a butler’s pantry, built-in bar, or walk-in wine cellar – and visually separating the kitchen island from the surrounding casework by using metals or stone. An alternative is to paint or stain an island in dark green, black or gray, as an offset to lighter cabinets on the walls, or to build it in a dark species such as Claro, real mahogany, or even teak.

For the past couple of years, matte black hardware has been hot as a counterpoint to white and light-colored cases. Now gold and gaudy are trendier, along with shiny chrome.

Fluting is enjoying a resurgence. It delivers vertical impact in five-part door panels, end panels, and backsplashes. Woodshops like flutes and scoring because they are easy to produce on most panel materials using simple CAD/CAM instructions, or they can be purchased in sheets. The parallel lines deliver a subconscious message that the door or cabinet is taller rather than wider, and hint that the room, too, may be taller than it really is.

Another trend that can confuse our sense of space is the idea of losing the upper wall cabinets and adding more large drawers in the bases. Along with that is a move toward mixing hardware – using long pulls in the bases and small knobs in the remaining uppers. Those missing cabinets are being replaced by open or floating shelves and rather than paint, these often have solid wood, stone, mirrors or even wallpaper behind them for a splash of drama. While wallpaper and mirrors are inexpensive and easily changed, more costly marble is trending away from Carrara toward other white marbles and even granite. One reason for that is after centuries of quarrying, Italian Carrara with those signature soft veins is getting harder to find. The floating shelves replacing uppers are generally either glass, natural-edge thick wood, or stainless-steel. Sometimes they take the form of floating cubes or cubbies that are used to display specific objects such as collectibles, culinary treasures or even family photo frames.

After four or five decades of installing microwaves above the kitchen stove, designers are finally listening to cooks and placing these appliances lower down. The problem has always been that they’re hard to reach, especially for people who are a little shorter. The challenges include lifting down heavy dishes or being able to see into the machine to clean it properly. Now microwaves are being built in at countertop height, which is a trend that raised ovens off the floor decades ago and made them much more accessible to tall people.

Custom placement is trending in other ways, too, such as including more free-standing furniture pieces that have sentimental or aesthetic value. These include secretary desks, china cabinets, bookcases, sideboards or tall buffets that can be made to fit nicely in gaps in the cabinetry. The idea here is to break up monochromatic space, but also to allow family heirlooms to become part of the design. This trend may well have its roots in the confinement induced by Covid, where personalizing a space was essential to endure the thrall of constraint, and any connection to family was especially valued.

One enduring style, Shaker, is seeing a rebirth in kitchen and baths but in an altered guise. The stiles and rails are getting thinner, and sometimes extremely so to a point where Mother Ann Lee might not recognize them as having its origins in her fold. Two out of three custom kitchens being ordered are still some kind of modified Shaker, while about one is six is simple flat panel and the same number are natural wood or laminate raised panel. Metal mesh and grates are very trendy in Shaker and other five-part doors, with open weave mesh leading the charge.

Other consumer-driven penchants include light stone or marble backsplashes, stone slab counters with a natural edge, stone cladding on islands and walls, and strong demand for recycling bin pull-outs, which more and more suppliers are adding to catalogs and CAD libraries.

Technology is also affecting cabinet style, as LEDs appear everywhere, drawers and doors open to a wave of the toe, phone chargers go cordless and hide in recesses under countertops or in drawers, and outlet strips are now more common under the wall cabinets instead of spaced along the backsplash.

For woodshop owners who are trying to spot trends and create both designs and inventory that support them, it’s just as important to know what isn’t happening anymore. For example, monochrome white is fading, especially on doors and fronts with extremely high gloss finishes.

The type of job seems to be changing slightly, too. Total demolition and re-do isn’t quite as popular as it was, with fully one-third of remodels now saving the boxes and opting for new fronts, doors and sometimes face-frame treatments. That one is all about budget and higher interest rates.

The open plan, another widespread trend in new construction over the past few decades, is hitting some speedbumps. Younger buyers seem to want to separate the kitchen and hide the dirty dishes while they dine or entertain, and certainly while they watch media. That’s in part due to how we watch now, where a client is just as likely to stream on a phone in a bedroom as they are to dial into a network show on a big screen TV in the open-plan living room.

They’re also putting some of Grandma’s design options to bed. Provincial, farmhouse, and organized chaos have all been overdone of late, and younger homeowners now prefer sleeker lines and cleaner, tidier spaces. They want to spend their hours at home relaxing rather than doing housework, which is perhaps understandable as their jobs become more complex and technical.

Tile is a tricky one. Perennial standards such as subway tile have migrated to the budget aisle, and decorative busy patterns are in decline. Well, except art tiles, which are experiencing a resurgence thanks in part to online venues such as Etsy that connect homeowners, cabinet designers and customers in an impulse-driven shopping environment. Oh, and large tiles with muted colors that once were used for floors are now being used to cover those spaces on the walls where cabinets used to be.

Speaking of online shopping, custom shops trembled a few years ago when the big box stores and cabinet factories started bypassing them and selling both design and installation service along with budget cabinetry. Well, the good news is that roughly one-third of remodels are still by custom shops, and even though that’s a smaller market share than it was a couple of decades ago, the pie is now much larger so shops have essentially held their ground. The population continues to grow, and even though higher mortgage rates mean less new construction, they also mean more remodels.

Societal trends also bode well for custom shops. We are not returning to the office at the same rate that we left during Covid and as more people work remotely, they need more home offices along with kitchens and baths where they are comfortable enough to spend those long days. Artificial intelligence (AI) will augment this and accelerate it.

In a world with self-driving cars and apps for everything, simplicity is a luxury.

The tactile rewards offered by good space design and great workmanship are already in high demand by a faster moving population that will always need a place to call home.  

This article was originally published in the September 2023 issue.