6 Surfaces to Complement Your Cottage-Style Kitchen
A cottage-style kitchen can feel quaint, charming, and incredibly inviting. Features often include beadboard, painted cabinets, and a light, airy atmosphere that’s delightful and inviting.
While some homeowners like a shabby chic approach to the cottage style, this can sometimes feel old-fashioned in the kitchen setting. Thus, you may want to adopt a more modern take on the style with high-end materials and sleek finishes, reserving the distressed aesthetic of shabby chic for more casual spaces like the family room, for example.
When it comes to choosing natural stone or engineered countertops for your cottage-style kitchen, you’ll find that a variety of stone types can work, delivering different benefits and unique colors. Here’s what you can do to elevate your cottage kitchen when you install marble, granite, quartzite, or engineered quartz countertops.
1. Carrara Marble
White Carrara Marble
Bright and airy is standard fare in typical cottage-style interiors, where whitewashing reigns supreme. A white, tonal design is par for the course, and a soft, luminescent marble, like Carrara marble, will fit right in, thanks to a pure white background brushed with feathery strokes of pale gray veining.
Of course, bright colors are also standard in this style, and you can add a lot more personality to your kitchen when you pair white countertops with colored cabinetry, as in this tranquil cottage kitchen. The expansive island and perimeter counters shine in what appears to be Carrara marble, or perhaps a reasonable likeness in quartz.
This is paired with white upper cabinets and subway tile, offset by shelving and lower cabinets in a stunning navy blue. The look is incredibly modern and cohesive, with gold accent hardware in the pendants.
2. Delicatus Cream Granite
Although a white-on-white motif is common in cottage-style kitchens, it can feel a bit sterile, which is why it’s best to mix it up with some pattern and texture. Take, for example, this traditional white cottage kitchen.
The atmosphere is bright and pristine with cabinets, a subway tile backsplash, and coffered ceilings in white.
Delicatus Granite
The room is grounded with mid-tone wood flooring, accent tile in a complementary beige, and island and perimeter countertops in Delicatus Cream granite to keep it from feeling too monochromatic.
This granite variety features a cream-to-beige background with heavy, speckled patterning in gold, brown, gray, and black tones, creating a focal point in the middle plane of the space. It adds a ton of visual interest without straying far from the light, neutral palette.
3. Sienna Beige Granite
While many cottage kitchens rely heavily on white hues, the aesthetic is supposed to be a welcoming one, so it’s not unusual to see earthy tones displayed.
Add to that the creamy Sienna Beige granite countertops with veins of rust and brown, and you have a modern yet warm cottage kitchen that feels timeless and inviting.
4. Blue Pearl Granite
The cottage style is nothing new. Old-world cottages are in countries across the globe, although you may recognize the best from children’s fairy tales. It’s no surprise that they can feel a bit outdated, but there are many ways to put a modern, updated spin on this classic aesthetic.
A bright color palette can help to create the modern living space you crave, as in this contemporary cottage renovation.
The gray and cobalt color palette is incredibly modern, especially when paired with shockingly colorful countertops in Blue Pearl granite. However, more traditional touches like medium-tone wood shaker cabinets and structural columns help maintain the cottage style, blending old and new elements perfectly.
5. Bright White Quartz
Another modern take on the cottage style, this colorful, contemporary kitchen updates timeless elements with a contemporary twist, such as including bright white quartz. Beadboard and painted cabinets adhere to the hallmarks of cottage design, but everything else features modern appeal.
Design elements include minty cabinets and mint/gray checkerboard flooring; mosaic, sheet-tile backsplash; brilliant, Caesarstone Blizzard quartz countertops; and mid-century modern pendant light fixtures. It would be easy for so many disparate elements to clash, but they all go together beautifully with a shared color scheme.
6. Dark Quartzite
Add subway tile backsplash in baby blue and accents in attention-grabbing scarlet, and the look is not traditional. Dark wood flooring grounds the tableau, but the look is an incredibly contemporary reimagining of the cottage style.
No matter the style of your home, the experts at Academy Marble & Granite are waiting to help you choose the perfect slab to complement your interior and let your personality shine through. Check out our design portfolio for inspiration, or visit one of our showrooms in Bethel, CT, or Rye, NY, to start your project today.
