The Top 6 Kitchen Trends That Will Rule 2025, According to Designers
It’s almost 2025 (we can hardly believe it), which means a bit of reflection and a bit of looking ahead. In the world of design, the past year had so much to offer, marked, as it was, by tropes as varied as soft finishes, unexpected red, and—yes—fridgescaping. What does the upcoming year hold? That’s an overwhelming question, so we chose to narrow in on 2025 kitchen trends, specifically.
Kitchens will never go out of style (no matter what your Uber Eats order history might tell you!), and there are still endless ways to personalize them: from bespoke storage to tasteful paint colors to eye-catching floor tiles. We’re no oracles, but we’ve tapped some top designers to provide their forecasts for the kitchen trends that will absolutely rule next year. Grab your aprons: It’s time to hop on this bandwagon early.
“Dirty” Kitchens Will Be Your New Sidekick
If you actually cook in your kitchen, as nature intended and also frequently host cozy get-togethers, you’ll no doubt be obsessed with this trend for 2025: the dirty kitchen. You might be more familiar with this concept by its other names, like butler’s pantry or scullery kitchen. Gone are the days of messy countertops and overflowing piles of dishes—the “dirty” kitchen is a dedicated, covert, and, in most cases, pint-size space “reserved for the messy work of food preparation and cleanup that is hidden from view of the ‘heart of the home,’” says Brett Sugerman, interior designer and cofounder of the firm Modulnova Miami.
Per Tara Lenney of Tara Lenney Design, these secondary “workhorse” cooking quarters should ideally include “small appliances, a sink, dishwasher, fridge-slash-freezer, and oven that’s behind a closed door, letting your main kitchen act more like a gathering space.”
As part of Modulnova’s Miami showroom, this setup makes it clear that butler’s pantries and scullery kitchens don’t have to follow the “trad farmhouse” template.
Don’t believe the hype? Perhaps Zillow’s home trends data, which analyzes more than 300 homes mentioned in for-sale listing descriptions, can put you at ease. The report cites that the share of Zillow listings featuring a second kitchen is up 8 percent compared to last year, and we anticipate it only gaining more traction come 2025. So does Clea Shearer, cofounder of the cult-favorite home organization company The Home Edit. “I think this trend will continue to grow, as more people recognize the value of these versatile spaces,” says Shearer, whose own butler’s pantry is painted a dark color to contrast with her bright, white kitchen. “I’ve really maximized vertical storage in this space, which alleviates the usual storage stress in the main kitchen,” she adds.
Make no mistake, though: Such kitchens are far from “dirty.” In fact, the culinary offshoots might even start to overshadow your regular kitchen. ELLE DECOR A-List designer Mark D. Sikes chose to grace a Palm Beach villa project, featured in our October 2021 issue, with just this kind of room. According to Sikes, “a butler’s pantry is always a place to have a bit of fun, much like a powder room.”
“I personally like to paint the millwork a color and do a fun printed wallpaper on the ceiling,” he tells us. “I also like shirring a fabric behind glass cabinet doors.”
Sikes’s ultimate advice? “Decorate the butler’s pantry, not the kitchen.”
Fabric Fixtures—and Other Soft Touches—Will Trump Hard Surfaces
During Milan Design Week this spring, our editors zeroed in on the fact that natural materials are king—and will be for the foreseeable future. In the heart of the home, aka the kitchen, this can manifest in a few different ways, including a reliance on natural stone (“emphasizing the rich patina and character that [it] develops over time,” per Bria Hammel, CEO and creative director of Minnesota-based Bria Hammel Interiors) and the use of light fixtures with fabric shades.
“These are a specific item that I’m seeing more manufacturers create and more designers utilize,” designer Hillary Cohen of HCO Interiors tells ELLE DECOR. “They add some warmth and interest to lighting where glass globes have been predominant for so long.”
You heard that right. Many industry experts that we tapped for this piece echoed the sentiment that “people want warmth again,” in the words of Mark Williams and Niki Papadopoulos of Williams Papadopoulos Design. Sconces, pendants, or even simple table lamps with textural, cream-colored fabric shades are sure to provide just that kind of warmth—which will subsequently encourage more cozy cooking nights in your future.
Walls and Backsplashes Are Becoming the Artworks
If 2024 wasn’t your best year in the love department, you can change the narrative next year…by way of the kitchen. “We are entering our romance era. More ornate touches and romantic details are emerging in designs,” says TK Wismer, the creative director and lead designer of the Style Studio by Café, which provides kitchen design consulting services. That means you’ll see more “organic shapes, nature-inspired motifs, and delicate intricacies [that] are creating special moments in a design,” Wismer adds.
What could all this mean for your own kitchen reno? Well, embracing wallpapers, for one. Take a page from what ELLE DECOR A-List firm Hendricks Churchill did in an Upper East Side apartment’s kitchen, making it life-affirming via bright, floral wallcovering by Jennifer Shorto. Or else stick to something more subtle, like the creation of Centered by Design’s Claire Staszak above—an art wall made of a few close-to-the-heart pieces over a floral toile wallpaper, which adds an element of prestige to the place where leftovers are reheated.
“The kitchen design by Molteni&C is very sleek, minimal, and monochromatic with its white cabinetry and marble. As a result, we needed to sync the mood of this kitchen with the more textural and colorful design that we utilized throughout the apartment,” Hendricks Churchill’s Heide Hendricks explains of their New York kitchen design. “The punchy orange paper with its luscious strawberries and undulating vines brought a rhythmic and vibrant energy to the space.”
If you want to rebel even harder against the all-white kitchen, go with painterly backsplash tiles. In his Paris apartment, Valentin Goux—president of interior design company Rinck—created his own tiles in collaboration with his wife. As a result, they’re quite personal: bearing stylized chili peppers, mimicking the ones Goux likes to grow at his country house, and harissa tubes with the couple’s names in Arabic.
ELLE DECOR A-List Titan Pierre Yovanovitch also got on this trend early, outfitting the kitchen in his clients’ apartment with hand-painted backsplash tiles by artist Matthieu Cossé depicting birds in flight, lush trees, and a blue sky straight out of a children’s book.
Hendricks, too, gives painterly tiles the seal of approval: “More recently we have started to embrace illustrative tiles of William De Morgan or William Morris, as well as historic Delft tiles. A fresher and more modern application of these old-fashioned tiles is to insert them randomly or sparingly into a solid monochromatic field of tile.”
We’re taking notes!
Earthen Hues Will Dominate
As we close out the year, one particular fascination seems to prevail online (especially on TikTok). Yes, it’s the obsession with the 1975 children’s book Strega Nona but, even more than that, a true desire to emulate what this Italian grandmother stands for: lots of pasta, wholesomeness, and a countryside aesthetic. People the world over have been tapping into Strega Nona–fall vibes vis-à-vis their kitchens—emulating the book’s illustrations of rich earthen hues, contrasting jewel tones, terra-cotta objects, hanging herbs, and mismatched pots. Members of the “millennial gray” cult beware: This design direction, specifically in the color department, is something we’ll be witnessing even more of in 2025.
Lenney is in agreement with the whole “goodbye, neutrals!” ethos when it comes to trendy kitchen colors next year: “Natural tones will likely dominate, which is great because earthy, nature-inspired colors are easy to live with and have staying power. Greens and blues will remain timeless favorites, while edgier clients will start experimenting with rust and red tones for a bolder look.”
When in doubt, just think, What would Strega Nona do?
Fridgescaping Will Have Staying Power (but Not in the Way You Might Think)
Summer of 2024 saw the meteoric rise of fridgescaping, testament to the looming trend of flaunting, versus hiding, your kitchen essentials.
We know, we know. We just spoke of keeping your kitchen gleaming and spotless by virtue of having another one in which you actually cook and arrange your ingredients into Gordon Ramsey–approved works of art. Yet experts are also predicting the rise of a kind of shameless exposure of ingredients and kitchen tools. In other words: Get over yourself, drawers and cabinets and appliance garages!
“Continuing from this year, we anticipate that the trend of organizing kitchen essentials in an easily accessible manner will remain strong,” say Autumn Oser and Andre Golsorkhi of design firm Haldon House. “Elements like hanging pots, stacked mugs, and exposed plate racks not only enhance convenience but also contribute to a welcoming, lived-in atmosphere, particularly in busy family kitchens.”
Fashion designer and lifestyle guru Peter Som has taken this blooming trend to heart, making sure everything in his kitchen is out and proud, sans the tackiness: “I love Sub-Zero’s Glass Door Refrigeration to not only preserve fresh greenery, flowers. and herbs, but keep them proudly on display. I love a vase of fresh cut flowers, but the glass front allows me to take it a step further and enhance the look of my appliances as well.”
Given the internet’s recent obsession with fridgescaping (essentially, dolling up your fridge and thereby making late night snacks a more aesthetic adventure), it’s no surprise that the exposed look, beyond the fridge itself, is set to continue.
Bold, Veiny Stone Is *the Moment*
Katibelle Sharkey, creative director at the women-led stone yard BAS Stone, has a good feeling that people will only go bolder with their stone choices next year, “want[ing] more of a field of color in their materials.” Stone trends change like clockwork (vivid marble slabs were all the rage in 2022, for instance, and black-and-white marble’s high-contrast simplicity made a return circa 2024), but next year will definitely experience a push for materials that have a lot to say either through colors or veining, according to Sharkey.
“The oxblood burgundy that dominated the past few years is now being requested in new variations,” she tells ELLE DECOR. “People want this coloring but with a mix of gold and green within the stone or with a more painterly striking vein.”
She’s also seeing more clients gravitate toward earthy dark greens and bright reds for their homes. White marble hasn’t colloquially left the chat quite yet, but it’s being spiced up through intricate patterning.
Earthy dark green marbles? Why are we not surprised, considering the push for all things earth-toned when it comes to the kitchen?
If you want to zero in on just one stone with which to doll up your kitchen counters, look no further than BAS Stone’s most sought-after slab: the gray, veiny Truffle marble, whose detailed topography truly takes monochromatism to the next level. In fact, this material has such sway that it’s used for the floor of BAS’s own showroom in Long Island City! The proof is in the pudding.
Stacia Datskovska is the assistant digital editor at ELLE DECOR, where she covers news, trends, and ideas in the world of design. She also writes product reviews (like roundups of the top or )—infusing them with authority and wit. As an e-commerce intern at Mashable, Stacia wrote data-driven reviews of everything from e-readers to stationary bikes to robot vacuums. Stacia’s culture and lifestyle bylines have appeared in outlets like USA Today, Boston Globe, Teen Vogue, Food & Wine, and Brooklyn Magazine.
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