Every year the kitchen trend lists arrive in January and most of them describe a colour. The changes that actually matter are slower and more structural — how the room is laid out, what it is asked to do, and how much of the house it now absorbs.
We’ve been building kitchens in Calgary since 2003, and we spend a lot of time looking at what firms in other markets are doing. Regional differences are real. A kitchen in Ann Arbor gets asked different questions than one in Orlando or one here. But the direction of travel is remarkably consistent, and the same eight ideas keep showing up in the work we admire.
So rather than write another list of colours, we went and looked at eight recently completed kitchens by design-build firms across North America, and used their actual projects to illustrate where the room is heading.
1. The island stopped being furniture and became the room
The island used to be a place to put a second sink. Now it is the organizing object of the entire main floor: prep on one side, seating on the other, and the room planned outward from it. Past a certain size it stops being a piece of cabinetry and starts being architecture — which changes how you handle the ceiling above it, the lighting over it, and the traffic around it.
Almost always, getting there means taking a wall out. That is the part homeowners underestimate. The island is the visible result; the structural work is the actual project.
Forward Design Build Remodel in Ann Arbor took out a seventeen-foot load-bearing wall and replaced it with a steel beam, which is what made the layout possible in the first place. What replaced it is a large central island doing the cooking and prep work, paired with a separate seating area and a clear sightline through to the family room — one room that used to be two, organized around a single object.
Structural reworking like this is a large part of what their kitchen remodelling practice does — the design and the engineering sit in the same building, which is generally how a seventeen-foot span gets solved without a redesign halfway through.
2. Wood came back, but only half of it
Two-tone cabinetry has been around long enough to stop being a trend, but it has settled into something more deliberate. Stained wood on one run, painted cabinetry on the other, and the split doing a job rather than just providing contrast. It reads warm without going dark, and the wood usually lands where the wear actually happens.
The detail worth stealing is where the two meet. When the transition happens at a change of plane rather than mid-wall, the room stops looking like a colour decision and starts looking like a structural one.
Thayer Design Build rebuilt an early-2000s builder-grade kitchen in Corvallis for homeowners whose pantry was cut off by a walkway and whose upper cabinets stopped short of the ceiling. The replacement pairs custom stained alder with white painted shaker, adds floating shelves and a custom bar with a wine fridge and an alder wine rack, and centres the room on a Silestone quartz island with a waterfall edge. They also walled in one entrance and enlarged another, which is the unglamorous move that made the rest of it work.
Their kitchen remodelling work leans heavily on custom cabinetry, which is what makes a two-tone scheme survive contact with a real room — stock cabinetry rarely gives you the run lengths the split needs.
3. Stone stopped stopping at the backsplash
Two things are happening at once. Slabs are getting thicker, so the counter reads as a solid block rather than a veneer over substrate. And the same stone is running up the wall behind the range instead of stopping at a four-inch return or handing off to tile.
Both moves reduce the number of materials in the room, which is the actual point. A kitchen with three materials in it looks calmer than a kitchen with six, and the money goes further when it is concentrated. Full-height stone is also unforgiving of bad templating — this is not the place to save on fabrication. The Natural Stone Institute publishes the seam and thickness standards worth knowing before you specify it.
Buckminster Green did this in a Bella Vista rowhouse for clients who cook seriously and collect art. Rather than renovate the kitchen in place, they swapped it with the dining room — kitchen into the larger former dining space, new dining room in the old kitchen footprint with added cabinetry and a large glass sliding door. Designer Chrissy Ford ran the stone counters up the wall as the backsplash and set the whole thing over a checkerboard porcelain tile floor, with green cabinetry holding it together.
Swapping two rooms rather than expanding either is characteristic of how their kitchen remodelling approaches Philadelphia rowhouses, where the footprint is fixed and the only real variable is which room goes where.
4. Colour came back — and it isn’t all navy
After roughly a decade of white kitchens the pendulum has swung. What’s interesting is that it hasn’t swung uniformly toward the dark navy-and-graphite palette the trend lists keep predicting. A lot of the best work right now is using colour at mid-saturation — sage, sea foam, clay, muted blue-green — where the room still reads light but no longer reads default.
The version that dates fastest is a single saturated colour used everywhere in a room with one window. The version that lasts pairs the colour with a natural wood tone, so there are two warm things in the room instead of one loud one.
Hercules Design Build built a good example of the second approach in St. Louis: custom cabinetry in sea foam green with walnut accents, in a kitchen that had been a confined and dated room until they removed the walls between it and the dining room. A wall section near the back stairs came out too, replaced with a streamlined railing. The structural side involved beam work and resizing windows — the sort of thing that turns a cabinetry project into a construction one.
Colour choices that hold up over ten years tend to come out of a design process rather than a showroom visit, which is roughly how their kitchen work is set up.
5. The peninsula died and the family room moved in
The peninsula was a compromise: an island for houses that couldn’t fit one. It half-divided the kitchen from whatever was next to it, and it forced everyone to walk around the end of it. It is now the single most commonly removed element in a kitchen renovation, and what replaces it is usually not just an island but a merged room.
The consequence people don’t plan for is ventilation. Once the wall between the kitchen and the family room comes out, cooking smells reach the sofa, and a range that was fine against an exterior wall now needs to be somewhere it can actually be vented.
McLennan Contracting worked through exactly that sequence on a Leola kitchen and family room. The peninsula between the two rooms came out; the stove was relocated specifically so it could be properly ventilated; and a large island took over the storage and seating the peninsula had been doing badly. The finishes went quiet to let the merged room read as one space — Calacatta Prado quartz, Urbano Crema tile, maple cabinetry in a flat-panel door and a white finish, and the existing stone fireplace painted out so it stopped competing.
Merging two rooms cleanly is mostly a mechanical problem before it is a design one, and their kitchen remodelling work in Lancaster County deals with a lot of older housing stock where that’s the whole job.
6. The kitchen keeps annexing the room next door
The footprint of the kitchen hasn’t grown much. What’s grown is the number of functions parked immediately beside it: a dry bar, a coffee station, a homework counter, a landing zone. The kitchen is annexing whatever is next to it, and the walls in between are the first thing to go.
The interesting version of this isn’t adding storage. It’s finding dead square footage inside the existing footprint — a formal dining room nobody eats in, a planter, an oversized hallway — and giving it a job. That is renovation as reallocation rather than expansion, and in a market where an addition is expensive it is often the better answer.
Park & Patina Design Build did a clean version of this in Longwood. Alongside the kitchen itself — maple slab-door cabinetry, new flooring across the main level — they added a dry bar, then removed a set of interior garden boxes and converted that footprint into a music area. Nothing was added to the house. A room that had been decorative became a room that gets used.
Reallocating space rather than adding it is the thread through most of their kitchen remodelling work, which suits Central Florida’s single-storey plans where an addition means giving up yard.
7. The kitchen got personal again
The white kitchen was, among other things, a resale decision. What is replacing it is not a different palette so much as a different premise: that the room can hold something specific to the people who live in it and still be worth money later.
In practice that means one deliberate custom element rather than a scheme — a tile run drawn from something the homeowner made, a piece of furniture used as an island, a colour that came from an object in the house. One is enough. Three is a theme, and themes are what date.
Merrick Design and Build took this about as far as it goes on a project they call The Storybook Kitchen. The homeowners had a galley kitchen and a crowded living room next to a family room nobody used, so the family room was reallocated and both spaces grew. The cabinetry is Candlelight, with articulated joints on the island drawn from Lori’s taste for Mission-style furniture — and the backsplash was designed from Bill’s own watercolours.
Getting a personal element into a kitchen without it reading as a novelty takes a design process with enough room in it to ask the right questions, which is what their kitchen remodelling practice in Maryland and DC is built around.
8. Kitchens are stopping being kitchen projects
The last trend is the least visual and probably the most consequential: fewer people are renovating just the kitchen. The kitchen is increasingly one component of a larger reorganization that takes in the laundry, the entry, the primary suite, sometimes an addition — because once you have the trades in and the walls open, the marginal cost of the adjacent room is far lower than doing it separately in three years.
This is a sequencing argument more than a design one. The kitchen is usually the room that justifies the project and sets the finish level for everything else, so it gets designed first and then dictates the rest.
Janacek Remodeling worked at the far end of this scale on a 3,400 square foot home in Rogers that roughly doubled in size. The kitchen and laundry were remodelled as a single piece of work, alongside a new primary suite with a custom closet, an interior storm room, an enlarged deck and a rebuilt fireplace with glass railings. The house went from traditional to modern in one pass rather than four.
Running a kitchen as part of a whole-home sequence is a scheduling discipline as much as a design one — their kitchen remodelling sits inside a practice that also does additions and historic restoration, which is generally what it takes.
What this looks like in Calgary
Most of these show up in our own work, adapted for the housing stock we have. Calgary’s inner-city bungalows and 1970s two-storeys tend to arrive compartmentalized, so the island-as-organizing-object idea usually starts with a structural conversation rather than a design one.
Our Woodbine kitchen renovation is the clearest example — a series of small rooms and a dropped ceiling became one space around a fifteen-foot island. The Copperfield project is the colour argument in practice: navy lowers, soft grey above, full-height quartz.
Two things we’d add to the list that we didn’t see enough of elsewhere to call trends yet. The first is the walk-through pantry — a second, smaller room absorbing the small appliances and the mess so the visible kitchen stays usable. It works best as a walk-through rather than a dead end, so groceries never cross the island; the Oakridge renovation has one running between the kitchen and the mudroom. The second is lighting in four separate layers — ambient, task, accent and something low — on separate controls rather than one switch. It costs almost nothing at rough-in and is effectively impossible to add later. Woodbine has under-cabinet, toe-kick and ambient layers doing exactly that.
If you’re planning a kitchen renovation in Calgary, our kitchen renovation page covers how we scope and price this work, and our process explains how design-build differs from hiring a designer and a builder separately. The NKBA also publishes useful planning guidelines if you’re at the early stage.
