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Do you ever have the feeling that your home was once part of the crowd? Just like when you look around, you just notice intentional decorative details, as if your home was dressed for a special occasion. It’s almost like your house has been invited to a party… except that party was more than a few decades ago.
What Paint Colors Go With Oak Cabinets
One of the signs that your home’s holiday days may be a thing of the past is the presence of a honey oak. Lots and lots of honey oak.
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Honey oak was super popular in the 1990s, and as a result, many homes still have honey oak cabinets, honey oak trim, honey oak molding, honey oak flooring… well, you get the idea.
There is nothing inherently wrong with honey oak. It has a rich golden hue that can look very beautiful in the right circumstances. But because it was so popular in the 90s, it seems dated now. Plus, thanks to its strong color, it tends to dominate any room it’s in and can be difficult to coordinate with.
If you have honey oak in your home and want to change its look, you can still use a fresh coat of paint to liven up your walls and soften those cabinets! In this article, we look at some of the best paint colors for honey oak and look at honey oak in real homes for inspiration on how to work with it.
Alabaster is a very light white color that has just a hint of tint. Gives a cream color effect but without yellow tones to clash with the honey oak. This color is great for brightening up a kitchen with honey oak cabinets.
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Tricorn Black is classic and traditional black. This can provide a dramatic backdrop that usefully brings out the rich, golden hues of the honey oak. Honey oak is also light enough to provide a contrast to the black, which keeps the room balanced.
Salty Dog is navy mixed with vibrant royal blue tones. Navy is gaining popularity as the new neutral and is great for kitchens. Blue is a beautiful complementary color to honey oak, so Salty Dog is a natural companion for its golden tones.
Aquatic is a cool and soft light blue green color. It brings a refreshing and relaxing feel to balance spaces that would otherwise feel too warm and stuffy with too much honey oak.
Search Blue is a soft blue with purple undertones. It brings to mind the antique styles of porcelain and cottage design. Looking for blue is another direction to try this honey oak standby supplement. You can see how it makes the floors and ceilings of this kitchen shine as it wears off the white trim.
Greige Paint Colors
Evergreen Mist is a soft and juicy green-grey. It’s also Sherwin Williams’ new color of the year for 2022. A sage green like this gives honey oak a naturally harmonious look.
White Dove, a soft shade of white, is a wonderful choice for brightening rooms with lots of honey oak in them, or providing a nice clean contrast to honey oak accents and trim.
Hale Navy is a dark night navy that provides a deep background for the honey oak to shine through. These colors will bring out the best in each other as the honey oak takes on the blue in Hale Navy and lets it shine through.
Jack Frost is a cool blue that takes Honey Oak in an upbeat direction with vibrant color. It’s good for a room you want to keep on the positive side.
Wall Colors For Honey Oak Cabinets
Purple lace is a light lavender blue. Purple is the complementary color of yellow, so it is the natural counterpart to the golden tones of the honey oak. Purple lace is light enough to help brighten slightly darker rooms, so it does double duty for you at the same time.
A lotus leaf is a fresh blue-green juice. This color mutes and softens the honey oak and gives the room an organic atmosphere inspired by nature.
Party Hat is a medium-toned lavender color that offers a soft complement to honey oak. It is a good color for decor with a romantic feel, and cottage and French cottage styles.
Just A Tale is a cool rich purple that leans towards its blue side. This is a darker color that will enhance the richness of the honey oak just like the deep sea does, but it brings more light color to the table.
House & Home
Now that we’ve looked at some great paint options for honey oak, let’s explore honey oak in real homes for some inspiration!
This cheery bathroom makes great use of cheery blues and crisp whites to complement the honey oak cabinets and decor.
This kitchen proves that you can successfully use dark colors in small spaces. Blue teal and honey oak balance each other beautifully.
This honey oak floor is echoed by gold cabinetry, while black and white serve as coordinating colors in a perfectly elegant kitchen.
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Would you think bubblegum pink is a great coordinating color for honey oak?! This works because pink and yellow work and we can refer to honey oak as yellow for palette selection purposes.
This modern kitchen uses gold metal to create a connection between the honey oak floors and the navy cabinets.
The honey oak comes on strong. There are golden shades that are really challenging to control and coordinate with other colors. If you want to soften the honey oak look while updating your home, your two color families are neutrals and cool colors. Stay away from things that add yellow, like buttercreams, and choose more neutral creams and whites. Black is a very striking option that will look dramatic and sophisticated, but be sure to balance its intensity.
Purple is a natural complement to the golden tones of honey oak, so although less conventional for a kitchen color, it’s a great option. Blues, especially dark ones, are another choice that can’t go wrong. The green ones can be good too, just make sure they have more blue content than yellow.
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If you follow these tips and look at the winning colors we’ve covered in this article, you’ll be well on your way to taming a wild honey oak in your home. who knows? After bringing in some fresh coordinating colors, you might even decide to keep that honey oak!
Stevie Miller is a freelance writer with over ten years of experience. She is also an artist with a passion for color and studies the relationship between color and emotion. She teaches art classes for adults and enjoys helping people discover their creativity. When Stevie is not writing and researching, she enjoys knitting, crocheting and spinning yarn on her big antique spinning wheel. Learning how to choose the right paint color to complement your oak kitchen cabinets can be a difficult task. I have selected my best farmhouse inspired paint colors to go with oak cabinets here in this post.
Updating your old oak cabinets doesn’t have to require painting the cabinets yourself! You can take simple but important steps to update a space and bring your kitchen into the 21st century. From backsplash, countertops, fixtures, lighting, and painting, I share all of these steps in a line of updated oak cabinets. Keep in mind that the colors I share will vary from kitchen to kitchen. Painting the walls is the first step in making the oak kitchen cabinets more modern. It all depends on other factors that I talk about in my series that will complete the change.
Maybe you don’t have the budget or the skills to remodel your kitchen and need a quick fix right now. One of the first steps to updating oak kitchen cabinets is painting the surrounding walls. Cheap paint and a good starting project. When we lived in Texas we bought a fixer upper with lots of oak cabinets. Painting the cabinets on top of everything else I had to do seemed too daunting and I had no interest in doing it.
The 16 Best Paint Colours To Go With Oak (or Wood): Trim, Floor, Cabinets & More (part 4)
The key to choosing a farmhouse paint to complement your oak cabinets is to find one that doesn’t compete with the orange tones.
The first step to making your oak cabinets more modern is to choose a color that tones the orange color of your oak. You want to avoid cool toned colors and choose a color that has more warm undertones. You will reduce the orange tones in your cabinets and not enhance it. One tip I offer for choosing paint would be to order peel and stick paint samples.
They are reusable and repositionable 12″ x 12″ vinyl squares with real manufactured paint on them to give the swatches the exact look of the colors you choose. They offer colors from several of
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