Ina Garten's Clever Tip For Picking The Best Kitchen Wall Paint Color

For decades, Ina Garten has shown her audience how good taste and simplicity go hand in hand. From her recipes and home décor to dinner hosting tips, the Barefoot Contessa walks a fine line between keeping her lessons elegant yet accessible. Some of Ina Garten's best kitchen design tips actually stem from her own processes and the spaces she personally uses, and she's spoken of the colors featured in her kitchen and why they worked so well. 

At one point, Garten's kitchen had sage green stripes on the walls with black and white tiles on other surfaces. Her reason for using subtle colors in the kitchen is that the focus of the room automatically goes to the brightly colored foods that are being used. Since it's a kitchen, ingredients should take center stage, and this is exactly what Garten achieves with her subtle color scheme through dramatic contrast. By keeping her kitchen's surfaces almost looking like a blank canvas, she's able to add color and draw focus to elements that she chooses. This can be for various ingredients, dishes, pieces of crockery, and even decorative flowers, which the television personality and cookbook author has a penchant for. With countertops, one can pick either dark or light colors since both offer an aesthetic contrast. However, avoid the appliance color mistake of getting dark appliances; get light-colored ones.

Ina Garten's barn kitchen lies adjacent to her home in East Hampton and was specifically built for testing recipes and filming her Food Network shows. This is Garten's flagship kitchen and, consequently, it's rife with great kitchen design ideas. Here you can see many of her design philosophies at work, including the high-ceiling structure wrapped in light colors and the long, jet-black countertop. Even functional and decorative items on the kitchen counter, such as lamps and cutlery holders, match the minimalist color palette so when a brightly colored vegetable, dish, or drink is placed on the counter, it draws attention. Additionally, the light colors help give the space an open feel. While picking light colors is a good idea, it's best to avoid glossy white for kitchen surfaces since it emphasizes any flaws the surface may have. Instead, consider using a light shade of gray, which Garten revealed was her favorite color when asked about her kitchen wall paint choices.

When it comes to her home kitchen, the food icon renovated it during the pandemic. The upgraded space, true to her word, features extended swathes of light gray, bracketed by off-white. In a spring Instagram post, where the flowers on her countertop pop dramatically because of her kitchen wall paint color choices, it's easy to see Ina Garten's philosophy of using neutral, subtle colors at work. Like much of her presentation, it's simple, elegant, and elevated to feel like it's greater than the sum of its parts.