Whether you find a new home with a kitchen that has, somehow, already been designed to most of your specifications, a fixer-upper rife with just enough possibilities to outnumber its potential headaches, or the space you’ve always enjoyed starts to seem a little dusty, the siren song of renovations will ring out one day. Although there are ways to save money on a kitchen remodel, it won’t be cheap, easy, or fast. So you want all those upgrades to last. In other words, do not acquiesce to the tyranny of trends when you’re plotting a kitchen update, or your real estate might be a pain to unload down the road.
It’s fun to scroll social media and see all the ostensibly novel ways folks are tailoring their homes to skew closer to what they believe is their own taste. The bouclé upholstery or color drenching of today might be the kitchen trend that makes your home look outdated tomorrow. Imagine that you were in the market for a new place and found a beauty in all but one way: it has the ’70s avocado green kitchen that has become shorthand for this sort of hypothetical. Knowing the perils of an inevitable reno, you might keep looking. Create an “invisible kitchen” or whatever in your own home, and it could still be stylish in a decade, or it could be a harder sell.
When it’s actually okay to incorporate trends in your kitchen
If you are unspeakably wealthy, with an abundance of free time, and know a genius way to avoid environmentally destructive construction material waste, congrats. You’re one of the rare few who can bend to trends, burn it all down, and begin again when the tide turns once more. However, most home buyers may have to accept the decor du jour that might affect the resale value at a later date. If you’re still coveting some trend a year after it’s cycled out of ubiquity, go nuts. We live life in the moment, and you’ll probably enjoy that open shelving enough to cope with a potential price cut (or the expense of putting it back the way it was) when would-be buyers aren’t so keen.
You can also introduce trendy touches as they come and go in considerably less drastic ways than via a whole renovation. Considerably less permanent cafe curtains can make your kitchen feel extra cozy at breakfast, and you can still snatch them away by dinnertime to revert to a more minimalist look. Textiles in general — tea towels, fancy napkins, and the like — are tops for patterns that might not necessarily last. And even a coat of paint can give your kitchen a mid-century modern look that you can redo well before the next aesthetic era rolls around.
