When Danielle Kelling walked into her Brooklyn apartment for the first time, twelve years ago now, the kitchen was the room she liked the least. So she left it alone. For a long, long time.
You can picture it. Dark, dirty gray floors that never really looked clean, no matter how much you scrubbed. Cabinets and walls painted a flat, washed-out color she calls institutional, the kind you’d expect in a hospital hallway, not a home. A cold fluorescent light overhead that made the whole room feel even colder. Cabinet handles that kept catching on her fingers every single time she opened a drawer. And a big countertop microwave sitting right where she needed to actually cook.
By her own words, the kitchen was “cold, depressing, drab, and soulless.”
So she saved the kitchen for last, the way most of us do with the room we don’t want to deal with. And when it was finally time to fix it, everyone she knew probably expected the same predictable move: soft neutral paint, maybe a warmer light bulb, done. Landlord happy, deposit safe, kitchen still boring.
Why most renters play it safe
The trap with playing it safe in a rental! You spend money and time on the same beige-and-white ideas everyone else picks, and you end up with a kitchen that looks a little cleaner but still doesn’t feel like yours.
The reason most renters go that route isn’t really about the money. It’s the fear of losing the security deposit, or getting stuck ripping stuff out later when the lease is up. Bold color is treated like a homeowner thing. Everyone else is supposed to settle for what won’t get them in trouble.
And to be fair, there are things a renter really can do to make a tired kitchen better without risking anything. Danielle did a bunch of them.
She and her boyfriend pulled out the broken oven vent and put in a new over-the-range microwave (an LG STUDIO one) that also works as a vent and a light. That one swap gave her back the counter space the old microwave was eating up, plus it opened up a third work zone. Before, only one person could really cook in the kitchen. Now two people can move around at the same time without bumping elbows.
She’s honest about that install, too. She and her boyfriend rewired it and cut the hole for the new outlet themselves, and looking back, she says she should’ve paid a pro to do it. That’s a rare piece of straight talk in a kitchen story, and worth listening to if you’re planning anything with wiring.
She also added LED strip lights under the cabinets to push back against that awful fluorescent glow. Small fix, big shift in how the room feels at night. And she and her boyfriend swapped the gray vinyl floor for a peel-and-stick black and white patterned floor that took them about an hour or two to lay down. She calls that floor one of the “biggest transformations” in the room, and she’s not wrong.
Any one of those changes is the kind of thing a rental-friendly article would tell you is the “wow” moment. Add them all up and you’d think that’s the big move right there.
But none of that is the change she’s proudest of. And it isn’t what makes the room work.
The move most renters won’t make
The thing that turned this kitchen from “cleaned-up rental” into something that actually looks intentional was a color choice.
Not a safe one. Not a trendy one. A color most renters would talk themselves out of before they even got to the store.
She peeled the old, damaged laminate off the cabinet fronts (something most renters wouldn’t even try, because they assume damaged cabinets need to be replaced) and then painted them in Farrow & Ball’s Incarnadine, in a satin finish. Incarnadine is a deep, saturated red. Not brick red, not muted red, not a red that hides in shadow. A rich, blood-red color on every single cabinet in the room.
That alone is a bold call for a rental. Most people would stop there, or pair it with plain white walls to calm it down. That’s what a designer would probably tell you to do.
Danielle didn’t do that either.
She painted the walls in Farrow & Ball’s Pink Ground, a soft, dusty pink. So now she had a small Brooklyn kitchen with deep red cabinets against warm pink walls. On paper, that combo sounds like a mistake. Two warm colors from the same family, both loud in their own way, packed into one small room. Most people would expect it to look cartoonish, or like the kitchen version of a Valentine’s Day card.
It doesn’t look like any of that.
It looks intentional and expensive, the kind of kitchen you’d flip past in a magazine and assume cost ten times what it did.
Why the bold color beat the safe one
It’s pretty simple once you see it. All the sensible renter moves (the new microwave, the under-cabinet lights, even the new floor) made the kitchen work better. But none of them changed how the room felt to walk into.
The paint did that. And it worked because of one detail almost no one would think of first: the black and white checkered floor.
The floor is the piece that keeps the red and pink from tipping over into too much. Without it, you’d have a room drowning in warm color. With it, the eye gets a place to rest, and the whole room lands as retro and designed on purpose instead of busy. That’s the reason two colors that shouldn’t work together actually do.
And the whole thing is reversible. Every dramatic move she made can be undone with a fresh coat of paint and a peel of the floor. The original appliances and hardware are packed away, waiting for the day she moves out.
What it cost, and what it changed
The numbers on this makeover are worth pausing on. The whole thing came in at just under $1,000 (about €920) and took about two months, start to finish. No contractor. No landlord permission for major work. Just Danielle and her boyfriend, a plan, and a color choice most people would’ve tried to talk her out of.
“I feel so much more at home cooking in my kitchen now,” she says. “I actually enjoy being in the room now and also work more productively.”
The real lesson here isn’t about red cabinets. It’s about the quiet assumption most renters carry into every apartment they live in, that bold color is a homeowner thing and everyone else has to settle for beige.
So if you’re staring at a tired rental kitchen and a small budget, here’s the part worth remembering. Before you buy another can of “greige” paint, take a look at the kitchens you actually love and ask what color they’re built around. Sometimes the change that matters most isn’t the safe pick.
Sometimes it’s the one you almost didn’t make.
