Decorating Above Your Kitchen Cabinets

Female: All right.

Male: It was fantastic. And today although I would like to be outside, we’re going to actually move indoors with the little topic.

You have some space with your kitchen cabinets that you want to decorate but you just don’t know how.

Female: I just went through this exact dilemma and it's a hard space to tackle. It's usually pretty short, not a lot of room to go at least upward. We received a viewer email recently on this very subject it came from Jen. She writes “I would love to have you show suggestions on how to decorate above your kitchen cupboards. I have a beautiful new house with tons of cupboards that are about a foot below the ceiling.” So here is the question Jen wants to know, what do I do with that small space? Please help.

Male: We asked the Utah Designer to give her expert advice on how to turn that space into an actual focal point of the kitchen.

Female: And she actually let us tags along as she redecorated her kitchen with cabinets, so large with the ones Jen asked about take a look.

Jen: Since the area above the cabinet is only about one foot. And it takes full length of the cabinets. I wanted to show you a couple of different options of decorating ideas. So I’m going to take this down and we’re going to put some other things up there.

I'm going to show you how I'm putting them up there in groups and having some natural elements.

So in a cabinet like this, what we’re wanting to do is put things in groupings. So that you don’t just have a lot of things lined up across the top of the cabinets. So what I'm going to show you are different grouping than within the group we have different heights. There is a different. We don’t want them to be the same, same height.

So I'm going to be adding a few different things of different heights and I'm going to be trying to do odd numbers and putting in a few natural elements. We wanted to make it feel like there were groups along the way, so that it wasn’t just a number of items lined up although I wanted to make it just wasn’t a bunch of plant up above your cabinets but so that there was some interesting elements that came together. We had different heights going. We had groups in odd numbers. If you notice I put a few little natural elements. There were some little green balls, there were some little boxes with grass in it.

Plates are always very nice to put in a kitchen because they have a little bit of reflection so from light reflex off of it a little bit, it just fits well with the thing of the kitchen and you can take something right out of your cover and put it above the cabinet and it ties in with your kitchen.

Those few things in this kitchen help to make the cabinet above look better than they did before.

Female: Designer Angela Ingo is joining us now in the studio. Those were really great tips and that space above the cabinet, as we are mentioning it can be so tricky. Do you deal a lot of question about that particular area?

Angela: Yes, it's a big problem because it's not just a place you would just want to put anything. Often people fall back to just plants, stick plants up there. But it's always nice to figure out some other way to create a nice look above the kitchen cabinets.

Female: Because your eyes go there I mean your eyes do tend to go up.

Angela: Yeah and it ties in with what your kitchen what you are --

Male: Yeah, they’re going to go that whether is nothing there or whether there something there, so either way you’re going to see it. You got some more great ideas for us, you say one of the first things to do is to choose a theme for above the cabinet?

Angela: That’s a nice way to do it. A lot of people will have a collection or they’ll have something that sets certain color. So if you can pull things of a certain color or a certain thing. Like for example in this shot this girl, see the blue ball hanging on the wall. She got that from her mother and decided from there she wanted to start collecting blue glass. And so she got a very nice collection of blue glass and decided that’s what she want above of her kitchen cabinet. And it worked out really nice.

Female: So do you suggest -- I mean sometimes that space lengthwise on the cabinet can be pretty long, are you suggesting that theme all the way across the run?

Angela: It depends on how much space you got. You know if you have a long amount of space you want to do shorter fewer things. So for example in this one, there is a -- it's a shorter space and this women had a number of -- her name was Julie I got this from her blog called The Little Red Shop. And she has a beautiful collection of cake plates and pie plates. And see all she just changed it out a little bit this time she added some red. So it showed you with some white and then a little bit of red.

So you can do a couple of different things. So you got the possibility of doing it all one color or then change it up to add a few of the colors in with it and it creates a different filed.

Female: That’s kind of a clever idea where it looked like she did neutral just the white in the glass and then you -- because I got bored easily.

Angela: Add a little bit of another coast she added red. And she mixes it in and then she even change the little curtain that was above the window. It was white before and then she changed it with some floral it has some red in it some yellow in it.

Male: When the items you say are to group the items -- You sort of showed that in the picture. You sort of having a little different groupings and cluster them together, right?

Angela: Yes now, you know that we talked about this before this is a very common design principle. If you take things in groups, different heigths and you put them together they’re more pleasing than if you just line them up. So say that kind of principle ties to all kinds of decorating with you and your home. So here we just took white plates, we took some green plates so the thing going on here was kind of green and white. But notice the texture of the little box we have up there, that adds some interest as well. So it's not just the all glass and it's not just --

So that we have another box on the other end and it kind of ties in.

Female: Yeah, okay here’s my question on the grouping principle for this particular space above the kitchen cabinets. How do you make it so it's not stuff and start type of a field?

Angela: Well if you have a common theme going on then you want to have more in one space less than another. More on another so it's not -- you kind of just -- it's a flow that you don’t wanted to all be the same. So it's not just three, three, and three. But you have more like five or seven and then you have three and --

Female: So you can place continues kind of strain of items but just the different heights, the groupings little there.

Angela: Yes. So in the moment we think with pie plates, that was more of just filling the space but it wasn’t very much space to fill. It wasn’t a long, so people have really long grouping I mean a really long cabinet you don’t want to just fill the whole the thing too much.

But as we go along, I’ll show you a couple of other possibilities of things that are not filling the space.

Female: Okay.

Male: The next one you say, loosing the natural ones because we seen some of just like the pottery or the glass. And then you would say throw in some little you know plants or green things in there so that natural things.

Angela: You know I love about doing this. I was really trying not to put a big leafy plant up there because it's so common.

Female: I feel you’re not a fan.

Angela: Well you know what they’re okay it's just that --

Male: It's a fall back a lot of people do it, yeah.

Angela: And it's like trying to do little something different. I add some fruit a little bit of just green, grassy kind of green rate. I added some little balls that had green on the. So they were natural elements but they were not just a box with a bunch of green items.

Male: And even your green plant there was not a traditional green plant. It's not like the typical whatever, a -- or whatever you see. It was some weird kind of odd thing that’s added a little bit of infrastructure.

Angela: Yeah thou it, it gives you a little bit more of a different personality rather than just having you know green maybe up there. I think how green it maybe and add a few of things to it.

Female: How much is too much I mean you don’t want a build a forest up there obviously but I mean would should every grouping has sort of measure on it or that’s over done.

Angela: You don’t have to have greener on it. You just want to have -- and this is kind of a personal preference a little bit here in the grouping and further on down a little bit there. It really is just kind of depends on what you have because I'm trying to help you did is what you have.

Female: Right.

Angela: So they’re not going out you know pulling a few things from different places in the house that really -- if you got it and it looks good leave it there.

Female: So it's sprinkling. [Voice Overlap]

Male: I have a question about picking the right stuff because you done some great job at picking. How do you know what's going to work, what's not going to work? How do you know it's going to fit in your decorate thing?

Female: It's called to Hire your designer right.

Male: Angela, get over here.

Angela: What I'm trying to do is help people see that you can take something right out of your own cover. Just take plates right through your own covered. That’s was a great --

Female: What about the reflection on the plate, I like that point that [Voice Overlap]

Angela: They have kind of a shine to them. Then you have a few other things you put up there that are -- and so for example in this women’s house she had gotten a big clock as she gone to a store a design sort of look I need help above my kitchen cabinet. She brought home all this stuff. It was way too big for the space she had. So we took down and here in the corner -- okay this with her space was tall, so we just put the platter in the corner with the greenery and then over to the side we put the little metal, little ornamental metal.

Female: To stretch it out a little bit.

Angela: Now the rest of the cabinet has nothing, has nothing. So you don’t have to feel like you need to fill the whole things, sometimes you can just do the corner. And then she had a cabinet over here that just had the white plates and the little ball of with green berries and the green candle.

Female: Do you go right to the ceiling, do you feel that spaces completely.

Angela: You don’t have to but if you have -- this is important for if you have a lot of space that’s up above your cabinet you want something that’s larger in scale. If you have a lot of little things and you have all that space it feels very uncomfortable, not right. But if you have a like she have smaller cabinet and have this big clock on the small cabinet and it felt very tough heavy. So we had to take that down, we put up that little arrangement of the plates and the candle and the ball and it felt much more in relation to the cabinet.

Female: Sizes correct in space.

Angela: But then in the corner she had a much taller space and we need to do something bigger. So the platter was much larger there was just some traditional greenery in the front and then the iron of to the side and that was attached to the wall. So it wasn’t necessary in front that.

Female: All right Angela great tips thank you so much. Hope we got answer to viewer question and then another questions you might have. For more great ideas and inspiration, be sure to visit Angela’s blog imaginecozy.com, link it there from our website. This is great about helping you, savings of the new eye and pull things you already have to make a pleasing space and in to your house.

Male: Thanks Angela.