How to Use Wallpaper in Your Kitchen Design

Wallpaper in the kitchen? Don’t think that tile and stone are your only options. This article outlines how to use wallpaper in your kitchen. Because the kitchen is ground-zero to home cooking, it is also home to splashes, splatters, and spills. If you cook (or only use it as a receiving hub for your take-out… no judgement here!) it makes sense to stick to materials that are easily cleaned. We’d also like to suggest you think outside that box and consider making your kitchen a more intimate and elegant location.

Think of the kitchen like any other room you’re decorating. It needs attention paid to color, pattern, hard and soft materials, metals, the list goes on! In this post, we will show you how to use wallpaper in the kitchen. We will also reveal how we employed this design idea in our most recent kitchen renovation.  The post ends with other gorgeous wallpaper in the kitchen inspiration to get you started dreaming of your perfect kitchen.

Centered by Design, Lincoln Park Kitchen Remodel

How to Use Wallpaper in Your Kitchen

The kitchen is often thought of as the “heart of the home” and a place of gathering for the family and guests. It’s hard to get people out of the kitchen! Why not embrace this and make your kitchen not only a place of functionality but also of gathering and entertainment. Consider adding wallpaper on cabinet backs, behind open shelving, or on accent walls that are out of the way of direct cooking – even the space above cabinets to the ceiling. The above photo from our recent Lincoln Park condo renovation utilizes wallpaper in two of the ways we’ve suggested, both on cabinet backs and on an accent wall.

Installing wallpaper in your kitchen is one of the easiest ways to make it feel personalized. Infusing color and pattern will give your kitchen special visual detailing. One of our favorite ways to use wallpaper is behind kitchen cabinets. When doing this, choose glass cabinet fronts to make sure your wallpaper doesn’t go unnoticed. It creates a stunning jewel-box effect that highlights the contents of your cabinets.

As seen in our Lincoln Park condo, we employed this technique on one wall of cabinets with a dry bar and on an adjacent wall to tie it into the rest of the kitchen. Keeping the rest of the cabinets solid gives a streamlined and cohesive look, while highlighting the cabinets above the dry bar lets them shine. These wallpapered cabinet backs face a living room, transitioning flawlessly from kitchen space to living space. 

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