You may be looking at that bland, tiny kitchen and thinking it’s not possible to get it to look anything but that. But believe it or not, there is a formula to making that small, plain and forgettable kitchen look expensive and hella good! And all that without necessarily dipping too deep into your savings.
To be clear, ten steps to attaining this look will be discussed in this guide, and some won’t even cost you a dime. They are practical, actionable, and achievable before the weekend is over. Some will cost the price of a takeaway coffee, but all of them will change how your kitchen feels and looks to every guest that walks into your space.
1. Clear the Counters Completely
This is the single most powerful thing you can do for your kitchen, and it costs absolutely nothing. Expensive kitchens have clear counters. Not because the people who live in them don’t cook, but because they have made a deliberate decision about what lives on the surface and what lives inside a cupboard.
The visual noise of a crowded counter (things like the toaster, the air fryer, the fruit bowl, the stack of post, the random bottle of oil) is the primary reason most kitchens look chaotic rather than curated, regardless of how beautiful the individual items are.
What to do:
Remove everything from your counters, and I mean everything. Then add back only the things you use every single day and the things that are beautiful enough to deserve the space. For example, a kettle you love, a wooden chopping board or a small plant. Store away everything else, even if it means using it is slightly less convenient, because I promise you, the visual result is worth it.
💛 Style tip: A single item on a counter looks intentional. Two items look like the beginning of a collection. Three or more items start to look like clutter. Work in singles and pairs only.
2. Upgrade Your Hardware, It Takes an Afternoon
Cabinet hardware is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort upgrades available to any kitchen. The handles and knobs on your cupboards and drawers are touched dozens of times a day and seen every time anyone enters the room. If they are cheap, plastic, or builder-grade chrome, they are silently undermining everything else about your kitchen.
Replacing cabinet hardware with something beautiful (such as brushed brass, matte black, antique bronze, or ceramic) is typically a one-afternoon project that requires nothing more than a screwdriver. And the visual transformation is genuinely startling.
What to look for:
- Brushed brass or unlacquered brass — warm, timeless, works beautifully with cream and wood kitchens
- Matte black — graphic, modern, pairs well with white and grey cabinetry
- Aged bronze — warm and antique-feeling, perfect for a cozy or traditional kitchen
- Ceramic knobs — handmade-feeling, characterful, work in cottagecore and warm aesthetic kitchens
The key is consistency, so choose one finish and apply it everywhere. Mixing hardware finishes throughout a kitchen almost always reads as unfinished rather than curated.
💛 Budget note: You do not need to replace every handle at once. Start with the most visible doors, preferably the ones at eye level and the ones you touch most and work outward from there.
Amazon product recommendations for cabinet hardware: Click to view and buy
Ravinte 30 Pack 1-1/4 inch Matte Black Zinc Euro-Style Cabinet Knobs, Drawer Pulls & Door Handles
3. Address Your Lighting As One of Your Kitchen Styling Ideas
Lighting is the most underestimated element in any room, and kitchens are where it matters most. Cool white or blue-toned LED bulbs make food look unappetising, surfaces look harsh, and rooms feel clinical rather than welcoming.
Switching to warm white bulbs (look for 2700K–3000K on the packaging) is a change that takes five minutes and costs almost nothing. The difference it makes to how your kitchen looks and feels is immediate and profound and everything becomes warmer, softer, and more inviting.
Going further with lighting:
- Add under-cabinet lighting strips — they illuminate work surfaces beautifully and create a layered, expensive-looking glow
- If you have pendant lights, consider replacing the shades — a rattan, ceramic, or textured glass shade immediately elevates a space
- Add a small lamp to a kitchen shelf or counter if your main lighting is ceiling-only. This is because a secondary warm light source creates depth and atmosphere.
The principle is the same one interior designers use in every room of a home: layered lighting always looks more expensive than a single overhead source.
Amazon Product recommendations: Click to view and buy!
ASOKO Dimmable LED Under Cabinet Lights Warm White 2700K, 3 Pcs
4. Edit Your Open Shelving and Remember That Less Is Always More
Open shelves are a gift and a trap. When styled well, they are one of the most beautiful features a kitchen can have as they are warm, personal, and deeply inviting. When overloaded, they become the most visually exhausting thing in the room.
The mistake almost everyone makes with open kitchen shelving is filling every inch of available space. Expensive kitchens do not fill every inch. They leave breathing room, they use odd numbers of objects, and they vary the height and texture of what they display.
A simple framework for styling open shelves:
- Back row — your tallest items: a stack of beautiful plates, a large ceramic jug, tall bottles
- Middle — medium height items with visual interest: a small plant, a wooden bowl, a beautiful oil bottle
- Front — small objects that add texture and personality: a folded linen, a small candle, a single piece of fruit
Remove anything that is purely functional and not beautiful. Items such as plastic containers, half-used packets, and mismatched mugs belong inside a cupboard. Your open shelves should contain only things you would be comfortable with if a guest stopped by and saw them.
Amazon Recommendation: Click to view and buy
💛 The editing rule: if you have to think about whether something belongs on an open shelf or not, it probably doesn’t.
5. Invest in One or Two Beautiful Functional Items as One of Your Kitchen Styling Ideas
There is a category of kitchen objects that live permanently on the counter or shelf because, why? Because they are used every day, and their quality has an outsized effect on how the whole kitchen feels. For example, your kettle, your coffee maker, your chopping board, your oil and vinegar bottles, and even your fruit bowl.
Most people buy these things purely on function and price, which means they end up with a collection of mismatched, aesthetically incoherent objects occupying the most visible real estate in their kitchen. A single upgrade in this category, this could be one beautiful kettle, one generous wooden chopping board, or one set of handsome ceramic canisters, shifts the entire register of the space.
The highest-impact single upgrades:
- A matte black or brushed steel kettle — visible from across the room, used multiple times a day
- A large end-grain wooden chopping board — doubles as a serving board, looks architectural on a counter
- Matching ceramic canisters for tea, coffee, and sugar — removes visual noise instantly
- A proper fruit bowl in a material you love — ceramic, marble, woven rattan
You do not need to upgrade everything at once. Choose the one item you look at most and start there. One beautiful object in a space of otherwise ordinary ones still elevates the whole.
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6. Add a Plant Because One Living Thing Changes the Energy
There is something about a living plant in a kitchen that no amount of decorating can replicate. It adds oxygen, warmth, organic texture, and the quiet suggestion that someone who cares about beautiful things lives here.
The kitchen is actually an ideal environment for many plants, given its warmth, humidity from cooking, and proximity to windows, which makes the kitchen hospitable to a wide range of species. And you do not even need a dramatic arrangement, because a single plant in the right spot is enough.
Best plants for kitchens:
- Pothos — trails beautifully from a high shelf, thrives in low light, near-indestructible
- Herbs in terracotta pots — basil, rosemary, thyme — beautiful, fragrant, and functional
- A single fiddle leaf fig or olive tree in a corner — architectural and statement-making
- Trailing rosemary in a window — fragrant and visually lovely against the light
The pot matters almost as much as the plant. A beautiful terracotta pot, a ceramic vessel, or a simple linen-wrapped planter transforms even an ordinary plant into something that looks considered and intentional.
💛 Agas Home pick: A cluster of three terracotta pots in graduating sizes on a windowsill, one herb, one trailing plant, and one small flowering plant creates a kitchen vignette that looks effortlessly expensive.
7. Create a Considered Colour Moment to Achieve a Luxury Kitchen Decor
Most kitchens are designed to be neutral, that is, white walls, cream cabinets, grey stone surfaces and neutrality is a perfectly sound foundation. But neutrality alone rarely looks expensive. What makes a neutral kitchen feel luxurious rather than simply plain is the presence of a considered colour moment, perhaps a deliberate, curated introduction of one accent colour used consistently throughout the space.
This does not mean painting a feature wall. It means choosing one colour and letting it appear in multiple small ways: in your ceramics, in your linen tea towels, in your plant pots, in the spines of a few books on an open shelf, in a single piece of wall art.
How to create a colour moment:
- Choose one accent colour — warm terracotta, deep sage green, dusty blue, or warm brass
- Introduce it in at least three places — pot, textile, and ceramic, minimum
- Keep everything else neutral — the accent colour should feel curated, not busy
- Vary the intensity — one piece in the full colour, two in softer or deeper versions of it
The effect is the appearance of a kitchen that was designed with intention rather than assembled over time from whatever was available. That appearance of intentionality is what people respond to when they describe a space as looking expensive.
8. Hang Something on the Walls
Kitchen walls are the most neglected surfaces in most homes. People invest thought and money into what sits on the counter and what hangs in the living room, and then leave the kitchen walls entirely bare.
A kitchen with beautiful, thoughtfully chosen wall art looks immediately more designed and intentional than an identical kitchen with bare walls. And in a room where you spend a significant portion of your waking life, the visual environment matters more than most people acknowledge.
What works well in a kitchen:
- Botanical prints — timeless, warm, work in almost any kitchen aesthetic
- Vintage-style food or market illustrations — characterful and deeply appropriate to the space
- A single large-format print above a dining table or breakfast bar makes the space feel anchored and complete
- A small gallery wall of two or three related prints on a narrow wall creates a collected, personal feeling
Digital printable wall art is particularly practical for kitchens because kitchens are humid and greasy environments — a printed and framed digital file can be easily replaced if it gets damaged, unlike an expensive original artwork.
💛 Download cozy kitchen and home wall art prints instantly from my Payhip Store
9. Style Your Sink Area, Which is The Most Overlooked Vignette
The area around your kitchen sink is one of the most-used and most-photographed corners of any home, and in most kitchens, it is also the least thoughtfully styled. A collection of mismatched washing-up liquid bottles, a scratched dish rack, and a damp cloth draped over the tap is the visual reality for most people, and it pulls the whole kitchen down.
Treating your sink area as a deliberate vignette ( a small, styled scene) is one of the quickest and most impactful things you can do for your kitchen’s overall appearance.
The expensive sink area formula:
- Decant your washing-up liquid into a beautiful ceramic or glass dispenser, the single highest-impact sink upgrade
- Replace a plastic dish rack with a wooden or stainless steel version or remove it entirely and dry dishes on a beautiful linen cloth
- Add one small plant or a single herb in a terracotta pot to the windowsill above the sink
- Keep one beautiful, matching set of hand soap and lotion on the counter
- Fold your dish cloths neatly or replace them with linen tea towels in a coordinating colour
The goal is that when someone glances at your sink area, they see intention rather than accumulation. Every object in that small space should be there because it earns its place — either through beauty, function, or both.
10. Keep It Consistently Clean — Styling Has a Foundation
This is the tip that no one wants to hear but every honest interior stylist will tell you: no amount of thoughtful styling overcomes a visibly dirty kitchen. Expensive kitchens are clean kitchens, consistently wiped down, free of grease splatter, with clear surfaces and clean appliances.
The reason this matters for styling specifically is that the human eye reads cleanliness as quality. A spotless, inexpensive kitchen reads as more expensive than a dirty high-end one. Cleanliness is the foundation on which every other styling decision you make either succeeds or fails.
The daily habits that maintain the look:
- Wipe the stovetop after every use because grease build-up is the fastest way to make a kitchen look neglected
- Clear the counter every evening before going to bed, and leave the surfaces empty
- Keep the sink area dry because a perpetually wet sink area looks unkempt, regardless of what is in it
- Empty the bin before it overflows
These are not ambitious habits; they only take minutes each day. But they are the invisible infrastructure that makes every other styling choice in this guide land the way it is meant to.
The Expensive Kitchen Is a Felt Experience, Not a Price Tag
When someone walks into a kitchen and describes it as expensive-looking, what they are really responding to is the feeling of intention. The sense that someone made choices here about what stays and what goes, about what is beautiful and what is merely functional, about light and texture and colour and space.
That feeling is available to every kitchen at EVERY budget. It is not a function of what you spent, it is a function of how carefully you looked.
Start with one thing from this list, the thing that feels most immediately achievable and most immediately impactful for your specific kitchen. Do it this weekend, then come back for the next one. The transformation happens incrementally, and each step makes the next one easier to see.
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