There’s a kitchen in Williamsburg that’s 68 square feet. It has a working island. Not a cart. Not a butcher block on wheels. An actual fixed island with storage. The owner—a designer—made one non-negotiable decision first: she removed the upper cabinets on one wall and stopped pretending she needed them more than she needed to breathe.
Most small kitchens don’t fail because they’re small. They fail because people try to squeeze a full-size kitchen into the footprint and wonder why they feel like they’re cooking in an IKEA showroom display box that’s actively closing in on them. The mistakes aren’t about what you add. They’re about what you refuse to remove.
How to Make Small Kitchen Bigger: Stop Hoarding Cabinet Space
The instinct is backward. When a kitchen is tight, everyone thinks: more storage. More cabinets. More shelving. Taller cabinets, deeper cabinets, cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling because maybe you’ll use that 10-inch gap someday.
This is how you end up living in a kitchen that looks like a well-organized shed.
In Japandi design, restraint isn’t aesthetic—it’s functional. The philosophy says: own less, so what you own matters. A small kitchen designed this way doesn’t feel like storage with a stove attached.
Start by auditing what actually lives in your kitchen. Not what could live there. What you use weekly. If you cook regularly, you probably use 30% of what you own. The rest is “nice to have” or “might need someday” or inherited from someone else’s kitchen dreams.
Then make a hard choice: open shelving or closed cabinets, not both. A small kitchen with both reads as cluttered no matter how clean it is. Open shelving in Japandi style (think natural wood, minimal styling, negative space) works because every item visible has to justify its presence. This naturally limits what stays. Closed cabinets work too, but commit to that instead of hedging with a mix.
One designer in Copenhagen redesigned a 90-square-foot kitchen by removing the upper cabinets entirely and installing floating wood shelves on only half the wall. The other half was blank white wall. The kitchen doubled in perceived size.
Small Kitchen Kitchen Tiles: Horizontal Lines and Restraint
Tile is where people panic. “I’ll make it interesting,” they think, and suddenly the backsplash is subway tile in three colors, or geometric hexagons, or something that felt bold in the showroom and feels actively aggressive in a 4-by-6-foot space.
Japandi kitchens use tile as negative space. Usually: one type, one color, aligned simply. Horizontal tiles (laid in a horizontal running bond rather than stacked) actually do make a space feel wider—but only if the color isn’t fighting for attention.
Cream, soft gray, pale blue, or off-white works. The grout matters as much as the tile. Match it to the tile or go slightly darker for definition, but don’t use contrasting grout colors in a small space. Every grout line becomes visual noise.
One practical detail: stop at the backsplash. In a small kitchen, tiling the full wall up to the cabinets feels airless. A 18-inch or 24-inch backsplash behind the stove and sink is enough. It’s functional, it’s easy to clean, and it doesn’t make the room feel like the walls are closing in.
Budget around $15–25 per square foot installed for simple ceramic or porcelain tile in a single color, which is the right call here.
What to Do With Small Kitchen Nook: Make It Earn Its Space
A nook is tempting. It looks like wasted space, so you think you can save the kitchen by putting something there. A breakfast table, a bench, open shelves, a wine rack—it’s always something.
The problem: a nook in a small kitchen isn’t bonus square footage. It’s part of the kitchen’s visual real estate. If you fill it, the kitchen gets smaller. If you leave it empty, it looks like a failure.
The Japandi answer is counterintuitive: use the nook for one thing well. Not a breakfast table and a storage bench and shelves. Pick one.
In a 100-square-foot kitchen, a simple wooden bench (or even just a single chair) and a low table creates a tiny eating space that doesn’t feel cramped because it’s not fighting with storage or décor. In another option, a run of low, open shelving at seat height holds a small collection of bowls, glasses, or serving pieces—things you actually use—and that’s it. The space breathes.
If the nook is narrow (under 18 inches deep), leave it empty. Paint it the same color as the wall. It stops being a nook and becomes part of the wall. This isn’t failure; it’s editing.
Small Kitchen Kitchen Colour Ideas: One Neutral Base, One Quiet Accent
Color is where small kitchens go wrong almost as predictably as they go wrong with storage.
The safe choice—white on white on white—works, but it reads sterile. The confident choice—a dark forest green or moody blue—reads sophisticated in a 200-square-foot kitchen. In a 70-square-foot kitchen, it often reads like the walls are swallowing the space.
Japandi design uses a neutral base (warm white, soft gray, or pale natural wood) on walls and large surfaces, then introduces color through one accent element. Not the walls. Not the cabinets. One thing: the inside of open shelving, the underside of a floating shelf, the interior of glass cabinet doors, a single painted wall that’s only visible from the dining area, not the kitchen itself.
A kitchen in Stockholm uses pale plywood cabinets, cream walls, and soft gray tile—and the interior walls of the open shelving are a very soft sage green. From inside the kitchen, it’s minimal. From the dining area, there’s just enough personality. It costs nothing extra to paint the backs differently, and it changes how the space feels.
Avoid color on small kitchen cabinets unless you’re committing to painting the entire run. A single cabinet painted a different color looks like an accident or an unfinished experiment.
How to Make Small Kitchen Look Big: Edit the Vertical Line
The biggest visual mistake in a small kitchen is confusion at eye level. Cabinets, open shelving, floating shelves, a backsplash, tile, maybe some floating herbs, some photos, a cutting board—everything competing for visual attention at the height where your eyes actually land.
To make a small kitchen look spacious, create visual rest. That means: one clear vertical line (usually your upper cabinetry line or the top of your tile), one clear horizontal line (usually the countertop), and blank space in between. Open shelving, if used, should be minimal and well-spaced. Floating shelves should have more negative space than objects on them.
In Japandi kitchens, this principle is fundamental. It’s why they feel calm even in small footprints. There’s nothing fighting for attention.
A kitchen in Tokyo with only 60 square feet uses wall-mounted cabinets at a consistent height, a clear countertop with minimal items on it, a simple backsplash, and then blank wall space above. The eye has a clear path through the space. It doesn’t stop and search.
Practically: mount open shelving at least 15–18 inches above the countertop, not directly on top of it. This gap is where the space breathes. A shelf crammed right onto the counter makes the space feel compressed.
The final, most honest truth: small kitchens work best when you stop trying to make them do everything and accept what they actually are. A place to cook, not a place to display your life or store everything you own. That restraint isn’t a limitation. It’s the whole point.
