Bring some colour into your kitchen

Electric fixtures and fittings were once uniformly white but nowadays there is plenty of variety over the shade of your toaster, kettle or oven. Modern kitchen designs can even conceal these functional items behind cupboards – as integrated units – which means you can decorate your room in any colour you wish, without worrying about appliances sticking out like a sore thumb.

Colourful kitchens can look warm and inviting, or for a seamless look you could correspond your kitchen design with the colour scheme used throughout the rest of your home.

Why not try using white units and brightening them up with the addition of a bubble-gum pink Aga? Or you could opt for something cool and clean, like the pale blue and chrome combo of the Milano Contour Ermine in Rose and Jellybean?

By keeping the base colour neutral, you can use appliances and units to add an injection of colour and still be sure to keep everything within the realms of style and decency.

Abandon the rulebook and have a look at what you want your kitchen to represent. If you love a clean and orderly space but also want to include a splash of colour, then why not use coloured tiles to brighten up one of the walls?

Unrelenting white can look a tad Spartan for some tastes and if you've lived with one colour scheme for a long time then experimenting with new coloured units is a great way to shake things up.

If your kitchen has a high ceiling, instead of sticking with a traditional kitchen design, you could do something a bit different and change the ceiling colour. If the room is large enough, try a soft pastel blue, or a sage green; it works great in conjunction with some bright spotlights. Installing an LED strip of coloured lights beneath your worktops, or underneath wall mounted cabinets, can also work wonders.

If all this sounds a little too formulaic for you, then why not go for the mix-matched approach instead? Use two different colours on your units to create interesting patterns by alternating colour options.

You can also mix wooden surfaces with high gloss paint and modern glass to create something traditional, yet futuristic. You're not trying to go for a Chagall painting but you should to let your individuality sing out, this is your kitchen after all.

As long as you take the size and shape of your kitchen into account, colour will add a new dimension and you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.