10 Ways to Make Your Kitchen Look Expensive on a Budget
Refurbishing or redesigning a kitchen can be hugely expensive. Luckily, you don’t always need a huge budget to achieve stunning kitchen luxury looks. Our article about kitchen design ideas, gives you some tips and tricks for redecorating on a budget and on how to make your cooking space look expensive for less.
For many people, the kitchen is the heart of the home – it’s where family and friends come together to cook, chat, and entertain.
We often think of kitchens as showpieces in our homes, and functional rooms, and we want them to represent our own personal style. Kitchen renovations, however, are some of the most costly home improvement jobs that you can undertake.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways to up-style your kitchen without taking on a big remodeling job. Our tips come from top home designers and suggest ways that you can get that modern kitchen luxury makeover, without spending a fortune.
For most of these, you’ll just need a few materials and some basic home improvement tools. From utilizing color and texture to creating rich lighting effects to updating cabinets and kitchen worktops, we’ll show you how to make your kitchen look expensive on a budget.
Kitchen Design Ideas
Play with Texture
One of the key elements of great interior design is the incorporation of texture into your chosen space. You can make a room look luxe by combining different textures to create a visual appearance of depth and design. Try to introduce a range of surfaces into your kitchen zone.
This can be done inexpensively by adding some bare wooden cabinet fronts and combining them with some chrome, brass, or nickel features. The interplay of fresh materials adds a sense of variety to your kitchen design and gives the impression that all your details are hand-selected, even if they’re just basic DIY.
Pro tip: use this trick to create an air of richness throughout your home!
Bare Wooden Cabinet Designs
Choose a Color Palette
Carefully selecting your color palette can make all the difference for reinvigorating your kitchen. Although white is often used to make rooms look cleaner and sharper, design experts suggest opting for a muted tone instead.
You should also focus on choosing a range of complementary tones, rather than painting all your surfaces in the same color.
White surfaces can make your kitchen look stark and cause glare. This can actually make your kitchen appear cheaper, as it will look less carefully curated. Choosing an off-white color, like eggshell, or even opting for a tonal grey, makes a bolder statement and will offset any shiny or metallic details.
Upgrade Your Backsplash
A stylish kitchen backsplash can really amp up the design element of any kitchen. You can do this relatively cheaply by adding kitchen tiles to the backsplash area. Or, if mosaic tiling sounds too pricey, opt for an adhesive tile or mat instead.
Choosing a statement backsplash, such as an imitation marble tile or decorative design, can lift the feel of the entire space. If you’ve gone for a minimalist look elsewhere in your kitchen, a backsplash is the place you can go all-out and add a little extravagant flare.
Upcycle Cabinets
Painting your kitchen units or replacing kitchen doors and cabinet handles is a great way to upgrade your cabinets without taking them all out. A simple coat of paint on cupboards can really freshen up the overall feel of a room. Plus, it’s cheap and easy to pull off by yourself.
Similarly, if you feel your current kitchen cabinets are beyond saving, you could give them a new lease of life by refurbishing their faces. Replacing cabinet doors is not overly expensive and can even be done DIY if you’re confident you can cut new doors to fit.
To add a glamorous touch, try painting cupboard handles with metallic paint or replace wooden fittings with brass or nickel ones to give a modern, industrial feel.
Focus on Lighting
Lighting is an essential element of any room, and a cleverly designed lighting plan can elevate the feel of your space. Rearranging your kitchen lights can be as simple as switching out a tired old lampshade for new fixtures.
For example, a pendant shade or a glass globe fixture can cover a hanging bulb for a more appealing effect. You can also make lighting seem more sophisticated by adding dimmers or having lights installed on the underside of cabinets.
If you can add new lights in, consider hanging a statement piece above your kitchen island for a theatrical, centerpiece effect.
Hang Mirrors
It’s long been well known that mirrors can add a sense of size and dimension to a space. And, after all, the larger your kitchen, the grander and more luxurious the feel. Wall mirrors can also add more natural light to kitchens that have small windows or dark corners.
Choose mirrors that fit around your overall design and hang nothing that might get in the way or diminish the functionality of your kitchen organization. It could be a full length mirror or a simple wall mirror or a selection of mirrors that suits your style of kitchen design.
Choose Stools
With seating in your kitchen, you can save space and give your décor a stylish edge by using kitchen stools instead of dining chairs. Of course, if you have a full kitchen table as your centerpiece, you may want bespoke kitchen chairs to go with this.
However, if you have space around a kitchen island or beside your breakfast bar, stools look great and provide added function.
If your kitchen is large, try to organize the space so that the table area is for dining and the workspace area is for socializing and cooking. Counter stools near the workspace give your friends somewhere to sit and sip their wine as you prepare the meal.
Metal stools are great if you want to add a chic, industrial vibe, or opt for wooden stools if you want to give your kitchen a homey, rustic quality. Consider bar stools when searching, as they are a separate idea that sometimes can fit a kitchen design style.
Style Up Fixtures
For budget interior design, the devil’s always in the details. Even minor changes can make a vast difference with making your kitchen look expensive for less! Changing details, such as fittings and fixtures, can really brighten up and enliven your space.
Not happy with your current kitchen taps? Why not change them to something more modern, like gold taps or chrome taps?
You can also add shelves to bare patches of wall or give your window sills a fresh coat of paint to make sure that all parts of your room work together. If you want it to look like a professional job, paying attention to the finishes is definitely important!
Make Room for Display
One of the best parts about having a super luxe, stylish kitchen is showing off your cookware and accessories. Leave space for display storage to help give your home a bit of decadence.
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For example, if you have some great kitchen gadgets, why not invest in a countertop that will really show them off? One slightly larger purchase like this can really draw the eye and means that you can keep the rest of the room pretty simple, without having it look cheap.
Alternatively, if you have beautiful glassware or crockery, put in some simple open shelving to display it on. Similarly, you can add glass fronts to cabinets to show off decorative objects, like cut glass tumblers, liquor bottles, whisky decanter, or elegant dishes.
Any wall space near your stovetop or workstations can also hang a magnetic rack. This looks modern and professional and is a handy way to store knives and kitchen utensils.
Hanging racks for pots and pans are also extremely popular because of their space-saving capacity, affordability, and rustic look.
Install one above your cooker and you’ll have everything you need in reach before you work!
Add Some Artwork
Adding some artwork to your kitchen is a cheap and simple way to make your design look expensive. You can opt for modern images or images that fit in with your overall kitchen style. Framing prints is a great way to cheaply add pictures to your home.
You could also consider having professional pictures of yourself and your family taken. This is relatively inexpensive but can add an upmarket feel to your space, especially if the pictures are monochrome or artfully taken.
If you find that your kitchen has large expanses of bare walls, this can make the room look unfinished.
Carefully selecting artwork to fill the gaps is a great way to go. You could also display pottery or sculpture on any bare kitchen shelves, although avoid adding so much that the space looks cluttered.
Keep functionality in mind too when you do this and remember that a great kitchen should be easy to work in and to keep clean.
Sculptured Iron Accent
This unique sculpture has a charm that appeals to everyone, from men and women to boys and girls. Any adult or child would love this sculpture to add class to their living or work spaces.
This unique iron mini sculpture makes an excellent addition to any home and also makes a great gift for the voracious readers or avid book collectors in your life.
The small statue is lightweight so that you can place it almost anywhere in your home or office.
It’s only 2.51 pounds! Simply set the statue down, and you’re all ready for a beautiful, display on any piece of furniture, from the coffee or end table, to a bookshelf or office desk.
Conclusion
There are plenty of great ideas out there on how to design the perfect kitchen space. However you want to arrange your kitchen remember that it should be a room you like to use and to spend time in.
We can easily achieve this on quite a small budget by just using one or two of the options we’ve outlined above. We hope these great kitchen ideas have inspired you!
Archie was a builder for over 40 years. Mainly after his retirement the enthusiastic electrical works in garden and writes for a blog Homemakerguide.com to keep himself occupied.
His many years of experience can get you the right tool reviews, whether it is a drill, welding machine. An impressive fact to note about him is that almost everything in his house is a representation of his skills made by his hands.