31 of the Brightest and Best Kitchens in AD

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The kitchen has been the darling of interior design aficionados for quite some time. As for what makes for the best kitchen—well, that’s a matter of personal taste. Some like them bright, light, and white—and undeniably modern, sleek, and streamlined. Others are partial to a more rustic aesthetic and the French variety of this subset in particular. Others still seek out kitchens that break free from the proverbial bundt cake mold, opting to bring exceptionally unique and colorful spaces to life.

Over the years, AD has featured thousands of kitchens in its pages, speaking to a litany of different tastes in the process. Below, we present 31 of our personal archival favorites. Altogether, they represent a wide swath of this stylistic gambit—from exuberant and pattern-wrapped to clean-lined and contemporary. Read on to browse the creations of some of the best interior designers working today. You’ll also find detailed sourcing information and more than a few enticing tidbits along the way, from Anne Hathaway’s Swiss-inspired cook space to the room in which artist Urs Fischer makes the culinary magic happen.

A Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent New York Kitchen

Calacatta marble was used for the countertops, backsplash, and oven hood in the kitchen of Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s Manhattan townhouse that AD toured in 2020. Nonetheless, it is the smaller details of this scene—the wire cabinet screens and symmetrically placed lamps—that stand out as the most distinctive features of this image. Moreover, the bigger story of this feature was not so much an ode to marble but the very fact that the family had picked up and left behind their California home. “One thing I can promise you,” Berkus commented to AD this spring, “is that I will never again tell a publication that a house is my ‘forever home.’” “We learned our lesson,” Brent added. “We shan’t be saying that again!” Given that self-awareness, it should come as no surprise that just two years later, the couple and their two children opened the door to a different Manhattan townhouse they’d swapped this one for. And yet we’re still quite fond of this particular New York kitchen.  

A Moroccan Mélange

Local tiles and reclaimed marble form the bedrock of this kitchen, which features a vintage English pendant lamp and Malian textiles. The location is Tangier and, more specifically, a home that one New York couple took four years to renovate. AD100 designer Frank de Biasi commented to AD at one point in the April piece, “For me, layout and function and livability come first.” The house happens to be de Biasi’s own home, and a fantastic one at that. The pale greens and copper pots seen inside the kitchen are just the beginning of its colorful palette, and one that in part helped inspire a permanent relocation. “To be based here is just so much easier,” de Biasi reflected at the time to Hamish Bowles. “Life is led at a more measured pace.”

A London-Set Ode to Color by Patrick Mele

Between its Wolf stove and IKEA table, this kitchen runs the gamut in terms of style and price point. However, it’s the room’s unbridled use of color that make it truly worthy of the limelight. What’s more, its hand-painted Iznik tiles infuse the space with floral forms, while the vintage 1960s chairs and a nearby stool draw its pops of red further out. At the time, designer Patrick Mele described the home, which he decorated for a London-based couple, as “a little bit of bad taste, a little bit of fabulous taste, and a lot of books.”

One Colorful California Kitchen

Plummy purples and rich greens saturate the kitchen of this California home, where abstracted floral cutouts carry the day. Those cutouts can be seen on the room’s cabinetry, while Shaker chairs and an upholstered bench help emphasize the room’s pattern and texture. The open plan is further accentuated thanks to copper pots and contrasting pendant lamps. “If ornament is crime, Katie is my accomplice,” designer Frances Merrill said of her client, Katie Jordan, to AD. Crime or no crime, what’s abundantly clear is that the room is perfectly arranged to help make for a very happy home.

Studio Peregalli’s Bavarian Retreat

For one of two cover stories for the centennial issue of the magazine, writer Laura May Todd traveled to Bavaria to visit a countryside retreat. Designed by AD100 firm Studio Peregalli, the home’s kitchen featured Portuguese tiles, Peperino marble countertops, fir cabinets, and an iron hood. “He wanted a dreamy place,” firm cofounder Laura Sartori Rimini recalls of the client’s vision. “So, in every room here, we created a small world.”

Urs Fischer’s Culinary Studio

In December 2019, West Coast editor Mayer Rus traveled to artist Urs Fischer’s personal Arcadia, located in East L.A. Rus described the room seen above as a “giddy, polychromatic field of encaustic tiles that forms the floor of his voluminous mad scientist-meets-gourmand kitchen.” The Swiss sculptor added, “Some rooms, like the kitchen, you want to make you feel up and excited.… Other rooms, like the living room, you want to lower your heart rate.” At the larger of the two tables pictured, chairs by Hans J. Wegner offer perches on which to sit. The colorful cement floor tiles were made using an encaustic, or hot wax, paint method. Fans of Fischer’s work may be reminded of some of his most famous pieces, which are constructed out of wax, and melt into newly deformed shapes once their wicks are lit.

Anne Hathaway’s Swiss Vision

No, this kitchen, published in a fall 2019 issue of AD, is not set somewhere in the French countryside. Instead, it’s located in Southern California, and is inhabited by none other than actress Anne Hathaway and her husband, Adam Shulman. Inspired by Swiss ski retreats, it was created by AD100 designer Pamela Shamshiri of L.A.’s Studio Shamshiri. “Pam really leaned into it,” Hathaway told AD at one point. As for Shamshiri, the designer reflects, “We tried to maintain the sweetness that made the house so special while adding new layers of color, texture, and furnishings from different eras that reflect the evolution of the home over time and the warm, generous spirit of Annie and Adam.” Elsewhere, a white La Cornue range matches the Rohl farm sink. Copper pots play nicely off of vintage copper pendants, which are interspersed with light fixtures designed by Deborah Ehrlich.

A Blooming de Gournay Kitchen

In the October 2019 issue, AD visited the London home of Hannah Cecil Gurney. Considering that Gurney works for her family company de Gournay, the home was awash with color-filled floral wallpapers. As it happened, the kitchen was no exception. But instead of leaving it all to the chinoiserie, Gurney added additional pops of saturated colors that made the curling vines read almost like a neutral backdrop. (Interestingly, that wallpaper survived an early incident, in which Gurney’s dogs nibbled at its edges.) Simon Smith and Michael Brooke Architects helped design the open space “so the chef isn’t alone while all the guests are having fun next door,” as Gurney explained. The tête chef isn’t Gurney, however, but her husband, who, as she explained, regularly whips up meals to accommodate the couple’s robust entertaining schedule.

Une Cuisine Not Far from Paris

When Chris Burch encountered a historic home not far from France’s capital city, he was quick to fall in love. Nonetheless, that didn’t mean the 1608 hôtel particulier didn’t require a fair amount of work: “It needed renovation; it needed everything,” he told the magazine in May 2019. “But you could just feel it was wonderful.” Indeed. One particularly wondrous corner turned out to be the house’s kitchen, in which Burch installed a La Cornue stove. In a nod to the maison’s historic provenance, Burch kept its original 19th-century table and chairs, while installing a pendant light fixture from the same century and emphasizing tiles and ceramics from the one prior. With minty green paint and blue-and-white cushions, the room became the perfect canvas on which to display fresh fruits and fleurs.

San Miguel de Allende’s Blue and White Oasis

This image of a blue-and-white-tiled kitchen in Mexico graced one of the April 2019 covers of AD. The home in question, located in San Miguel de Allende, actually started as two distinct structures—which AD100 designer Michelle Nussbaumer ingeniously united. The colorful and undeniably unique Nussbaumer wasn’t about to whitewash any area of the home, least of all its kitchen: “I love bringing timeworn techniques into a modern era,” she commented at one point in last year’s article. “[A]nd the last thing this place needed was a marble kitchen.” While the jars seen are a mixture of new and vintage pieces, the tiles used were designed by Nussbaumer and made by Ceylon et Cie.

Will Kopelman’s New York Pad

“It was a rabbit warren,” AD100 designer Gil Schafer commented in the February 2019 issue of AD. “[T]otally opposite to the way families live today.” He was speaking of the über-divided kitchen, butler’s pantry, and laundry room that ultimately gave way to a much more open space. “I wanted to make the kitchen the centerpiece,” Kopelman says of the area’s re-envisioned cookery-filled room. “It’s where I make the girls breakfast in the morning and cook their dinner at night.… I wanted a space that could handle all of that.” It’s also a classic space that reads as more French country than as city-set workroom. The white subway tiles might betray a trace of the Big Apple, but its plate storage, farm sink, and wooden table, which dates back to the 19th century and was originally used by French silk traders, tell a different story. The La Cornue stove and its nearby cacophony of copper pans only accentuate the look. The hood was custom-designed by Schafer to match the range.

A Haas Brother’s Los Angeles Home

In November 2019, AD put together a package of some of the best kitchen products of the day. To help further illustrate the multi-page spread, images of enviable kitchens were liberally interspersed. Readers were no doubt hard-pressed to miss this marble-clad L.A. room, owned by Djuna Bel and Nikolai Haas. For collectible-design aficionados, Nikolai’s last name no doubt rings a bell, considering that he makes up one half of the Haas Brothers group. While the kitchen was first photographed for the magazine exactly one year prior, it made another more recent digital appearance, thanks to the newly unveiled series AD Visits. In its inaugural episode, Bel and Haas swept onlookers through this exact, textured space.

Athena Calderone’s Swoon-worthy Brooklyn Kitchen

In October 2018, AD popped on over to the Greek Revival townhouse of Athena Calderone in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. The main story was that Calderone, a designer and the force behind the popular blog EyeSwoon, was finally finished with her house-swapping ways and had found her elusive “forever home.” Readers may have been quickly distracted by another detail: Calderone’s dreamy open kitchen, which gave way to an enviable office nook. Calderone admitted to AD’s Jane Keltner de Valle that the sun-filled kitchen, which was coated in Calacatta Paonazzo marble, was “the star of the show.” That makes for especially logical sense, considering that much of Calderone’s work rests on documenting the food that she cooks. “For shooting purposes, you need side light, so that’s why we ended up with a square island instead of a rectangle. It sounds crazy,” she said at the time, “but I needed to make certain things work for my brand.” The barstools are by Thomas Hayes Studio, while the range is by Fisher & Paykel. AD100 architect Elizabeth Roberts helped with the design.

One Verdant Californian Dwelling

Matthias Vriens-McGrath has an uncanny ability to understand what makes for a good home. Why? He’s not only a photographer but also an antiques dealer. Inside his California home, which was once a key dwelling during Hollywood’s Golden Age, a seemingly simple kitchen blooms anew. Paola Navone woven-ceramic bowls and antique majolica pitchers are characteristic of Vriens-McGrath’s knowledge set, while nearby surfaces provide plenty of space for both edible and decorative greenery. “I like to surround myself with beautiful things, whatever they are,” he reflected at one point in the September 2016 issue. “If I love something, I can always find a way for it to live with all the other things I love.”

A Glossy Nantucket Space

On the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, one large and seemingly simple kitchen sits, ready to play host. The centerpiece of the room is its long, rectilinear table and four correlating benches. Built by Hudson Furniture, all five pieces make excellent use of walnut wood, while the table is covered with acrylic. That glossy finish pairs nicely with the kitchen’s sleekly white cabinetry, as well as its shiny wooden floors. The Lem kitchen island stools were purchased through DWR. In terms of appliances and fixtures, the microwave is by Gaggenau, the fridge is Sub-Zero, and the sink’s fittings are by Dornbracht.

Louisiana’s Finest Dutch-Enthusiast Kitchen

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is the setting for this Cape Dutch–style home and its expansive kitchen. The waterfront dwelling, which was featured in the October 2014 issue of the magazine, is the result of AD100’s Bobby McAlpine and Ray Booth’s considerable collaborative efforts. (“The place needed to look like it had been here for 200 years,” one of the clients noted to AD at the time of the brief to create a historically accurate home.) In the kitchen, that meant installing a 17th-century portrait and French antique chairs. The La Cornue range, and other appliances, are, of course, new.

Miles Redd’s Texan Creation

Each August, AD tends to highlight second homes and seaside escapes. The 2014 issue was no exception, thanks in part to this Miles Redd–designed kitchen. Unabashedly white and with just enough pops of red, it brings to mind a modernized lobster bake. But upon closer inspection, some of its sharpest details come into clearer view: The subway tiles seen extend throughout the entire cavernous space, while not one but two minimal chandeliers are hung akimbo. And yet, the kitchen in question isn’t located along an beachy coastline. Instead, it’s inside the exceptionally colorful Houston home of one couple. “It’s livable glamour, a world’s fair of decorating,” the client told the magazine at the time. “Around every corner is a surprise.”

Kelly Klein’s Warmly Minimalist Floridian Kitchen

The fact that photographer Kelly Klein’s home betrays more than a trace of minimalist chic shouldn't come as any huge surprise. After all, Klein, whose résumé also boasts her modeling career and work as an author, is the former spouse of Calvin Klein. An August 2012 Architectural Digest article, written by William Norwich and produced by Carlos Mota, visited Kelly at her then-new Palm Beach, Florida, home. Naturally, the home’s pool was of great interest (her book Pools is a famous photography best-seller). But the kitchen was equally appealing as a space to dive into, thanks to its Wolf oven range, Dornbracht sink, and Sub-Zero refrigerator. More striking was its total lack of cabinets. “Some people don’t like looking at their things,” Kelly mused at the time. “I like seeing my glassware and dishes.”

Muriel Brandolini’s Manhattan Home

For some, it’s the Viking range that catches their eyes. For others, it’s the bespeckled, and sometimes yellow, cabinetry, which alternates various tones. (City Joinery is responsible for them, and yes, those are indeed holes.) This kitchen, which was featured in the March 2011 issue of Architectural Digest, is chock-full of unexpected details—right down to its Czech chairs that date back to the 1930s. It’s no huge surprise that it’s located inside designer Muriel Brandolini’s own Manhattan townhouse. “With the right craftspeople, you give them an inch and then…whoosh!” the AD100 decorator told AD’s own Mitchell Owens at one point in the article. As an example of that very phenomenon, he pointed to those cabinets, which have Brooklyn-based furniture maker Jonah Zuckerman to thank for their enameled Swiss cheese aesthetic. The table, which further anchors the room, is by Jean Dunandy.

A St. Petersburg Apartment Photographed by Deborah Turbeville

If one were forced to guess which year this image dates from, the answer likely wouldn’t be 2006. And yet that’s when Deborah Turbeville, the photographer best known for her pioneering fashion images taken of women during the 1970s, traveled to Russia to shoot this kitchen and its surrounding rooms. “Most of the furniture is Russian, from different times but mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries,” explains Andrei Dmitriev, an interior designer and former linguist. “I limit modern things to the telephone and the computer.” The kitchen is a perfect example of this approach, with its clear sense of “age and rusticity,” as writer Joseph Giovannini stated at the time. “It’s more formal because I was trying to re-create the ambience of the 19th century,” Dmitriev added of his kitchen, which, complete with its northern Russian table, sits inside the cozy apartment.

One Mid-1990s Atlanta Kitchen

For design enthusiasts, it’s the Alessi tea kettle with bird whistle, famously designed by Michael Graves, that likely makes this image worthy of a double take. But beyond the photo’s foreground and nearby fruit bowl is a richly layered scene to unpack. A painted black-and-gray shelf houses a cloisonné bowl and various Chinese decorative arts works. The entire space, which exists within the Atlanta home of James and Sandy Cape, was designed and renovated by Thomas Britt.

A Late-1960s Throwback

For its fall 1969 cover, Architectural Digest chose to draw attention to a quintessentially American kitchen. Located in the Omaha home of Mr. and Mrs. William Utney, the room in question appears to be a bit older than the magazine issue’s date might imply—and for good reason. Rather than furnish the room with then-state-of-the-art appliances, the couple chose to carefully re-create a typical kitchen from the United States’ earliest days. A crackling hearth, a collection of blue-and-white china, a and ample supply of wooden pieces helped set the scene, while copper, brass, and silver details set the room aglow. Styled with sunny flowers, dried corn, and a bounty of cherry-red apples, the brick-clad space was the embodiment of colonial-revivalism.

Blooming in Blue 

Built on a wooded knoll and totally integrated with its environment, you might expect this home by architect Carlene Nolan Pederson to be furnished in natural tones and materials. Instead, the designers opted to go against the wood grain and add accents of bold cobalt blue along with neutral furnishings. The island and cupboards match the exposed beams visible in an adjacent living space. Plus open shelving on the wall leaves plenty of visual breathing space.

Loving Layers Chez Keaton

The kitchen in Diane Keaton’s Bel Air home that AD toured in 2005 is nothing if not an exercise in collage. Working with designer Stephen Shadley, Keaton brought in passions new and old. That chrome range is a 1950s O’Keefe & Merritt number that the pair did a U-turn to nab after spotting it in a store window while driving through LA. Keaton’s dishware collection adds dimension and draws the eye upward. The island, meanwhile, is made of repurposed California tile tables—the very items that first emboldened Keaton to embrace color in her home. An adapted Robert Frost quote was painted atop the arch, serving as something of a mission statement for the vibrant kitchen. 

Old School, New Digs

Bright by definition, this rooftop kitchen within an 18th-century Morocco property serves an outdoor entertaining pavilion. By the time they got a hold of the crumbling estate, designer Salem Grassi and homeowner Dorothea McKenna Elkon needed to demolish and rebuild the top floors. Grassi spent two years overhauling the home, touring mosques and palaces across Morocco and Spain, and meeting local artisans to help oversee select elements. There’s no doubt that those tile setters, painters, and stone-carvers came in handy when it came to creating the rooftop kitchen’s custom shelves and tiled floor, countertop, and backsplash. The result? A meticulous recreation of the aged charm that attracted McKenna Elkon in the first place.

Going Green

Emma Chamberlain is far from the first homeowner to try out a green kitchen, but her pistachio green sanctuary still took the internet by storm when her Proem Studio–designed home was featured in the pages of AD. “It almost felt like a summer camp, so we leaned into that mood. We described it as Wet Hot American Summer meets Troop Beverly Hills,” recalled Ashley Drost of Proem Studio. “Emma said, ‘I love that idea, but I have no clue what you’re talking about.’” Their chase after that summer camp appeal is evident in the kitchen, which is topped by wood paneling and skylights. 

Blue and White All Over 

If you’ve ever wanted to mix the fun of midcentury colors and patterns with the technology and comfort of the 21st century, this project by interior designer Jamie Bush and architect William Hefner is sure to satisfy. The kitchen is particularly captivating, with its steadfast commitment to only the most eye-catching hues of blue. The islands are topped with emerald quartzite, the flooring is by Hermosa Terrazzo, and the custom brass hardware is by Pasupatina. “I just love that it feels fun to me,” homeowner Mary Kitchen said to AD. “At the end of the day, if you don’t have a sense of humor, what’s the point?” 

Concentrated on Color Blocking 

Clever color blocking makes a whopping impact in this coastal Massachusetts kitchen by AD100 studio Reath Design. The case could be made that the red 1953 Chambers stove is the room’s focal point, though the eye can’t help but dart between that appliance, the yellow Bruno Rey chairs, and the Farrow & Ball Cook’s Blue trim. And though the lilac Pyrolave countertops offer throwback charm, they are thoroughly contemporary—and surprisingly even incorporate volcanic lava stone.

A Penchant for Play 

“The house feels playful—it has a sense of humor,” interior designer Muriel Brandolini said to AD of her family’s Hamptons home in the April 2014 issue. “It’s not about making a statement. It’s about our life.” That joie de vivre is easy to see in the kitchen that brings the home’s color-blocked exterior inside. Bursts of vibrant shades come in through the blue-trimmed windows and the pendant lights; plus a built-in bench offers a cook’s companion a place to lounge. Elsewhere, a few chairs lend a spot for the rest of the family to dine. 

Going Full Circle

From the beginning of AD100 designer Pamela Shamshiri’s work updating the historic A. Quincy Jones home of Los Angeles gallerist Shulamit Nazarian, she knew it was all about creating a space that was more comfortable for its homeowner. Naturally, the kitchen was a key part of this reconfiguration of the floor plan. The walnut-cupboard-lined circular kitchen calls to Jones’s circular concrete floors elsewhere in the home, and while Shamshiri insists it was the “most challenging” kitchen she’s ever done, the effort clearly paid off. “The kitchen is a place of gathering and nourishment,” homeowner Nazarian stated. “The new design connects the house’s more formal areas with the family spaces in the most beautiful, generous, welcoming way.”

Big Time Barrel Vaulting

Barrel-vaulted ceilings add a sense of subdued grandeur to this relatively humble 2000-square-foot Venice Beach pad. In the ’90s, rockstar and Lollapalooza creator Perry Farrell was looking to replace the simple wood cottage that stood on the property when he bought it, so he commissioned the structure from architect Steven Ehrlich. “I appreciate the Japanese sensibility of refinement, of choosing what’s necessary,” Farrell told AD during a 1995 tour. “When things get too big and ornate, they can make you uncomfortable.” The wood kitchen blends seamlessly with the Korean barbecue pit-centered dining room and stands open to a refreshing lap pool. 

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