30 Bold Blue Kitchens That Are at the Height of Good Taste

ELLE DECOR readers are smitten with this high-gloss galley kitchen in the California home of design insiders Joe Lucas and David Heikka—and it’s easy to see why with its cheerful blue paint job. “Before, the cabinets were all white, and I follow a golden rule—no white kitchens—so we immediately painted them,” explains Lucas.

This Toronto home features tall ceilings and elegant historic details such as ornate moldings, but designer Sam Sacks’s goal was to create a dwelling that was “loose and cool and livable” for the young homeowner. Key to her strategy was contrasting all that period fanciness with electrifying hits of blue—Sacks’s favorite color. In the kitchen, Yves Klein Blue upper and lower kitchen cabinets stand out against a white exposed-brick wall. Black countertops and a few bare plywood cabinet doors give the look a hit of De Stijl flair.

Jean-Louis Deniot incorporated the whimsy of Tintin into his vacation home off the coast of France. No space is as charming as his kitchen, with its custom blue cabinets—accented in neat, cream trim to play up the windows—and old-timey checkerboard floor.

Landscape designer Jenny Graham cites orange as her favorite color, but here in her minimal Argentinian kitchen, she contrasted her beloved tangerine with a bold, custom cobalt on the kitchen cabinets.

The beauty of blue cabinets is that the hue also complements a surprising spectrum of materials, from timber to terrazzo, the material of choice here in a sleek vacation home designed by architect Blaze Makoid and interior designer Joe Nahem.

Duck-egg blue is a total classic when it comes to kitchen cabinetry, and this is one of the most elegant examples out there. Here, in a Washington, D.C., residence, designer Zoe Feldman opted for Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green, a shade inspired by Victorian homes.

Not ready to embrace an all-blue kitchen? Try it in smaller doses, like in this happy Portuguese cooking space designed by Jacques Grange. In lieu of entirely blue cabinets, Grange deployed it just on the outer edges.

It’s only fitting that a home in the clouds would have equally vertiginous cabinetry. This Richard Mishaan–designed apartment, in Herzog & de Meuron’s Jenga-like 56 Leonard skyscraper in New York City, includes floor-to-ceiling blue cabinetry in a shade that matches the blue of the sky and the Hudson River far below.

If you have stainless steel appliances, a pale blue with gray undertones is the route for you. Here, designer Alison Palevsky picked a barely there blue shade (one that makes appearances throughout this sprawling California home) to contrast with the Viking stove and hanging pot rack.

OK, this technically isn’t a kitchen—it’s actually a bar area in a Hamptons home—but there are plenty of lessons to be learned here, courtesy of designer Poonam Khanna. She incorporated floor-to-ceiling vibrant blue cabinets (in Philipsburg Blue by Benjamin Moore) and leaned into their Crayola brightness with a set of sunny yellow chairs.

In Designer Brian J. McCarthy’s New York City apartment, an all-white kitchen makes use of a few blue elements: A stove and hood by La Cornue, and the wide swaths of pale blue stripes on the floor.