Inty AIRetro Kitchen Ideas
Seven retro takes on the same real kitchen, all shot from the same spot.
BeforeRetro forces you to pick a decade and stay there. There is no quiet version. Colour sticks to the cabinet doors, not to a cushion you can swap out in March, and that is why retro photographs so well and gets lived with so badly. The seven below can't even agree on the year. One is 1955 pastel, one is a 1950s American kitchen with adverts framed on the wall, one reads the 1960s through walnut and terrazzo, one is white units with a colour thrown at the wall, one goes full 1974 avocado, one is a space-age orange pod, and one is a diner with a checkerboard floor. Costs vary more than the pictures suggest. Handles and paint are a Saturday. Doors are a weekend and a delivery. Worktops and tile are a trade. A coloured range or fridge is just a purchase, and it is usually the cheapest way in.
7 versions of retro
Walnut and green terrazzo
Walnut doors, brass bar handles, green terrazzo worktop, sage square tile climbing the wall and spilling onto the floor, a brass-framed reeded glass cabinet lit from inside, a white range with a dial in the middle. This is the grown-up reading of the decade and it is also entirely trade. Terrazzo alone costs more than the other three kitchens put together. Nothing here is a Saturday.
Pink cabinets, mint range
Pink uppers with mint shelf edges, cream lowers, marble worktop, mint range with a pink tea towel on the rail, mint kettle and toaster, a glass jar of macarons by the sink. Doors and a range, so a weekend and a delivery, plus a trade for the worktop. Understand that pink cabinets are a mood with no off switch. On a wet Tuesday at 7 am you will either love it or resent it, and there is no middle setting.
Butter yellow and sky blue
Butter yellow doors, chrome bar handles, sky blue walls, a floral cafe curtain, framed Sunbeam and Coca-Cola adverts, a mint fridge covered in magnets. Note what it keeps: the white square tile from the real kitchen, untouched. This is the cheapest of the four by a distance. Paint, handles, a fridge, some frames. The chrome will collect grease around the hob and want wiping every week, and the adverts are one poster away from a theme restaurant.
White units, emerald tile
White units with recessed timber finger pulls, glossy uneven emerald tile, cream worktop, a green enamel factory pendant, a yellow stovetop kettle, mechanical scales, vintage tins on the shelf above. The tile is the only trade job and it carries the whole room. Everything else is paint, handles and things you collect. It also ages best of the set, because the year lives in objects you can move on when you stop liking them.
Avocado and mustard, 1974
Walnut doors with cane panels, an avocado green wall oven and matching hood, mustard mosaic tile, amber glass globes overhead, a cream retro fridge, orange enamelware on the shelves. This is the decade everyone's parents ripped out, reproduced with a completely straight face. The avocado appliances are the commitment — they exist new again, at a price — and the cane fronts are the detail that stops it reading as a museum. It smells of percolator coffee just standing here.
Space-age orange
Glossy orange cabinets with rounded corners, wood-slat walls, a white worktop, every edge in the room filleted like a 1970 vision of 2001. This is the version furthest from a weekend job: curved gloss fronts are bespoke fabrication, not a door swap, and the slat walls are joinery. It is also the one that will date the hardest and the fastest — which, for the person who wants it, is precisely the appeal. Retro-futurism means committing to somebody else's future.
Checkerboard diner
Cream gloss doors with chrome handles, a black-and-white checkerboard floor, a chrome-banded diner table with cream vinyl chairs, a butter-yellow fridge, a yellow kettle on the hob and framed Diner prints leaning on the counter. The floor is the trade job and the whole personality; everything above it is paint, chrome and shopping. Closest cousin to the Americana version, but where that one hangs the diner on the wall, this one lays it underfoot — harder to undo, better to live in.
See your own kitchen in Retro style
Every render on this page is one real kitchen, redesigned. Point Inty at yours: it reads the layout from a single photo, then rebuilds it in Retro and 200+ other styles. Your actual room, not a showroom.
Free to try. iPhone.
Questions
- What is the cheapest way to make a kitchen look retro?
- Butter yellow and sky blue is the answer. It paints the existing doors, swaps in chrome bar handles, hangs a couple of framed adverts and buys one coloured fridge, and it keeps the plain white tile the kitchen already has. Compare that with Walnut and green terrazzo, where the worktop, the floor tile, the splashback and the doors are all replaced and all need trades.
- Will a retro kitchen hurt resale or put off tenants?
- Pink cabinets, mint range will divide people, because the colour is on the cabinet fronts and a buyer cannot imagine it away. White units, emerald tile is the safer bet: the units are plain, and most of the decade sits in the kettle, the tins and the scales, which walk out of the door with you. For a rental, paint and handles are reversible in a weekend. Terrazzo is not.
- Which decade is retro, exactly?
- It depends who is selling it. Pink cabinets, mint range and Butter yellow and sky blue are both mid-fifties, but one is a European pastel and the other is an American kitchen with the adverts on the wall. Walnut and green terrazzo is closer to the sixties and reads as mid-century rather than retro. Pick one and commit, because mixing two decades in a room this size just looks like an accident.
- Can I see my own kitchen in these styles before I commit?
- Yes. Inty reads the structure of your room from one photo and puts the style onto your actual walls and units, which is how the four above all keep the same L-shape and the same window on the left. There is a 3-day free trial, then it is paid, and it needs an account. Treat the result as a visualization rather than a guarantee, especially on colour, and take a physical sample before you order doors.
- Does retro work in a small kitchen?
- Yes, because the decade lives on surfaces the kitchen already has rather than in extra furniture. Butter yellow and sky blue changes paint, handles and a fridge, and the galley stays exactly as workable. The small-room trap is committing every surface at once the way Walnut and green terrazzo does — tile on the wall and the floor plus terrazzo leaves the eye nowhere to rest.
- Are coloured appliances worth it?
- They are the cheapest way in and the easiest way out. The mint fridge and coral kettle carry most of Butter yellow and sky blue, and both move house with you. The working rule on this page: put the colour in the appliances if you rent, in the doors if you own, and in the tile only if you are certain about the decade.
