Following up on yesterday’s post about Nancy’s (popular!) kitchen project… and on our Monday blue Television Kitchen… here are kitchen cabinet paint colors straight out of 1953. Lots of good mix-and-match ideas.

I do want to point out that with two-tone kitchen cabinet combinations, you want your darker color on the bottom to ground or anchor the design. It’s interesting to study the color combo’s below – for their use of harmony … and contrast. Honestly, study these things – and over time your design-eye will sharpen! I do think there’s some innate ‘talent’ in design – but like most other pursuits, it’s 99% perspiration! Work hard, study hard, and your ‘instinct’ (and ‘luck’) will get better, ha.

Floors can be light or dark – one guide might be whether you want to bring sunshine (light) into the kitchen, or coziness (medium/dark).

One of the tips you also see written about a lot in the 50s – as everyone was learning to decorate, together — was to choose your principal color scheme based on the direction the room faced. That is, south- and western-facing kitchens will get a lot of sunlight — they will be “hot” — so to counter that, choose ‘cool’ colors… colors in the blue/cool spectrum. North-facing kitchens tend to feel “cold” because of the quality of the sunlight — so use red/hot colors there, to warm things up. Eastern-facing: flexible, ahhh… that morning sunshine! I’ll look for some info on this issue and feature more, in the future.

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Vintage paint colors are a big issue for virtually everyone, so I’ll start out the new year with these 1950s and 1960s retro paint colors scanned directly from a vintage Sears Harmony House brochure that I bought recently. The scanner does a good job on most of the colors, with the dark pinks and reds only a little off. While these have some similarities to the Sherwin-Williams Suburban Modern palettes, there are many more choices. Look, for example, at Malibu Peach in the upper right — it’s perfect!

This chart is also great because it shows wood stains. No year printed on the piece, but I’ll estimate late 50s.

I’ve kept the actual color chart, below, sized as large as possible. For those of you on Internet Explorer, it probably looks funny in the main view – slides off the screen to the right. Just click once the image in a new window, twice to enlarge it further. I’ve also included the thumbnail to the left – sometimes this opens largest for best possible viewing, it seems. Note, this blog is best viewed in Firefox/Mozilla.

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