The 14 Best Kitchen Design Tips We've Learned From Celebrities

Few things make us as excited as a well-designed kitchen. As a space that most of us spend a lot of time in, it's important for our kitchens to be not just functional, but stylish too, and to create a sense of calm and serenity in a room that can get pretty hectic. However, it can be all too easy to go with the flow when it comes to kitchen design, and either put up with the format and aesthetic that came with your house or else submit to a designer's whim without thinking about what you really want. When you encounter those moments, there's only one place you need to look: To the celebrities.

Although celebs are often far from the authorities when it comes to kitchen design, what they do have at their disposal is usually a lot of resources, money, and access to the most up-to-date trends. As a result, celebrity homes are fairly reliable places to look for good kitchen design tips that will make your space feel innovative. Plus, there are plenty of celeb-approved tips out there that don't just look good, but will add efficiency to your kitchen. Whether they're opting for vintage kitchen design trends or brand-new aesthetics, these celebrity kitchens are the place to look.

There's no denying that Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are a pretty stylish couple — and as a firm part of the Hollywood set, you can expect their kitchen to be just as trendy. Interestingly, though, Kunis and Kutcher achieve this by pulling off an unexpected contrast in their cooking space. The famous couple opt for liberal uses of black colors in their kitchen, specifically using black metal finishes on their island and cupboards to create an industrial effect. They pair these heavy, bold blacks with pops of lighter shades through their fixtures, and a vaulted ceiling that matches the slightly more commercial look with something rustic.

The result of this combo is a kitchen that's modish, playful, and yet pretty warm. It's a dynamic that designer Nina Lichtenstein loves. "Brass and copper can add warmth that complements the rustic elements of a farmhouse design, while blackened steel or matte black finishes can introduce an industrial contrast, giving the space a contemporary twist," Lichtenstein said to Homes & Gardens. "Don't shy away from mixing these metals; the juxtaposition of different finishes creates visual interest and adds depth to the kitchen."

Would you expect anything but glamor from Mama Ru? The world's most famous drag queen makes every inch of his house into an event, and his kitchen is no different. RuPaul brightens up his space with dramatic light fixtures that hang over his island, with two globed polygonal pieces dangling from gold chains. "I love these lighting fixtures right here because they remind me of underwater scuba gear from the 1930s or '40s," RuPaul said in a house tour with Architectural Digest (via YouTube), "They're just beautiful."

As well as being showstopping pieces of lighting, these fixtures also give his kitchen a burst of serious brightness while also shielding the lights contained within, so they don't give too much glare. Even if you can't find these specific pieces in-store (they look like they're pretty bespoke), opting for feature fixtures like these, which emit roundabout light, can make smaller spaces look bigger and more welcoming. Plus, you can create further contrast just like Ru has, by playing bright fixtures off against black cabinets or monochrome flooring.

If you know absolutely anything about Elton John, you'll know that he likes a bit of spectacle. Everything about the famous singer is designed to make a statement, and he and husband David Furnish's kitchen is no different. In their Beverly Hills house, their kitchen is both functional and seriously playful, with the all-white finish of the cabinetry and countertops playing off against colorful features. A bright green light fixture, which looks as though it's constructed of dozens of plastic discs arranged together, sits opposite a plastic yellow art piece. Elsewhere, there are colorful coffee mugs and plates, and bright yellow flowers create natural warmth.

This aesthetic is one that's repeated throughout the rest of their home, with the whites of their Beverly Hills pad offset with colorful sofas, chairs, and paintings. What we particularly love about John and Furnish's design choice is that you can achieve this super easily in your own home. With so many houses being sold and rented in basic white or light grey shades, it's never been easier to make a statement with color-containing set pieces. Just be bold with it. Plus, once you've added that color to your kitchen, you can try recreating Elton John's favorite sandwich. 

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to kitchen design — or, indeed, any interior design — is how to make the most of your space. This is especially a challenge in smaller kitchens, where design has to find a way to marry function with form. Sometimes, to solve problems like this, it can be helpful to look at larger spaces to see how they maximize their square footage and work backwards. This brings us to Ray and Anna Romano's kitchen, which makes some clever use of recessed cabinets to give the walls increased depth. On one wall, the Romanos have pushed back several cabinets which are flanked on either side by more, which creates a touch of airiness and dynamism instead of just flatness. Simple, but smart.

Their kitchen has some other clever choices which maximize the sense of space, too. It seems as though Ray Romano, the man who inspired Somebody Feed Phil, has built his countertops and island intentionally low, which gives a lovely airiness in the top half of the room. This accentuates the size of the space, which is admittedly pretty massive — but hey, that's how celebs like to live!

If there's one thing Serena Williams knows, it's angles. You only have to watch the best tennis player of all time (let's be real, we all know it's her) move around the court and take perfect shot after perfect shot to know that she understands the impact of corners and placement. It's little surprise, then, that her kitchen has some unpredictable angles that speak to both her sense of playfulness and her sense of style. This is particularly evident in her kitchen table, which is an irregular pentagonal shape, embedded into the island to create a series of asymmetrical corners and edges.

The table stands alone in a kitchen that's otherwise fairly uniform, but the boldness of this move disrupts the space and makes it feel exciting. There's further contrast created by the color dynamic, with the brown of the table acting as a counterpoint to the bright white island. The use of blues and golds elsewhere in the kitchen gives it even more playfulness, and the bursts of nature provided by flowers and fresh fruit soften everything.

In many ways, Robert Downey Jr. is one of the ultimate American movie stars. It's probably not a huge shock, therefore, that his home has classic pops of Americana peppered throughout it, which are also made just that bit more stylish to fit into the overall luxury aesthetic of his home. One place where this is most clear is in his kitchen, which embraces a retro-futuristic vibe perhaps most evident in the inclusion of a diner booth. It's not strictly a booth in the traditional sense as it's open on two sides, but it has a '50 feel and appearance that wouldn't feel out of place in an all-night roadside eatery.

The banquet in the booth is custom-made, with a pink, dotted design that feels homely and cozy. Placed in the corner beside two windows, the booth is also flooded with natural light, making it the perfect breakfast nook to eat your diner-style crispy hash browns. The best thing about it, too, is that the banquet is long enough for folks to take a lay down after they've finished their meal. It's great inspiration for us mere mortals, who aren't Iron Man, to embrace non-traditional seating situations in our kitchens, and not just rely on central tables or stools around an island.

Think of Dakota Johnson's kitchen, and you likely think of an infamous home tour she did with Architectural Digest, in which she claimed that she loved limes (and then later revealed that she was lying). What we think of when we think of her cooking space, though, is of her cabinetry. Johnson bucks the trend when it comes to kitchen cabinets, and instead of hiding her plates and glassware behind opaque materials, she uses clear glass to allow visitors to see what's inside. Doing this provides several functions: Not only does it let her colorful crockery pop from behind the glass, but it also creates a sense of airiness and openness in her kitchen, and in effect gives the eye a view of more space.

Johnson contrasts the glass with solid, dynamic greens, matching the cabinetry throughout on both the top and bottom levels, with matte silver handles that play against them. She adds to the greenery in her kitchen through the use of potted plants. Oh, and yes, those limes also create an added sense of verdancy, whether she actually likes them or not.

As a professional skateboarder, Nyjah Huston spends his life around curved and diagonal objects — he literally makes his money by traversing half pipes and grind rails, after all. It appears that his home life somewhat mirrors his professional one in that respect, and his kitchen is a collection of diagonals and curves that create real excitement. In Huston's cooking space, he has a central circular table, which is lined on one side by booth seating (which does resemble a half-pipe, we have to say). The table sits opposite a straight-edged peninsula island on one side, which juts off the counters at a diagonal angle.

Although this may all sound fairly messy, the overall effect is dynamic and actually pretty thrilling. Huston's kitchen design is clearly bespoke, but this is one of those celebrity kitchens that you can emulate fairly easily at home. It's all in your choice of table: Instead of going for a square or rectangular one, go for a fully circular option. You'd be amazed how much it makes your space feel more lively, and it's also a far more convivial vibe than going for a long, oblong-shaped choice.

Faucets are things that we don't think enough about. There, we said it. Let us explain: We often consider how our faucet will look, but not what it will look like in ten years. We therefore make fairly uncreative choices when it comes to materials, going for options like stainless steel, which won't rust but also hardly look that exciting.

Enter Nina Dobrev, who supplied us with a key design tip from her own kitchen that we're copying immediately. Dobrev opts for unlacquered hardware and faucets in her country-style kitchen. Over time, these faucets will age and will begin to show their wear and tear — but far from making them look weathered and beaten up, they'll instead start to look like timeless vintage pieces.

It's worth saying that if you're opting for this style, you'll want to make sure that it fits in with the rest of the aesthetic of your kitchen. If you're going for an ultra-modern, industrial-style kitchen and you're using unlacquered pieces, your space may start to look a little bit jumbled and messy. Instead, we'd advise using unlacquered hardware with more rustic, classic designs.

Kitchen design can be so boring, folks. These spaces are way too often overlooked in favor of fancy bedrooms or living rooms, and the kitchen is often an afterthought that simply has to be functional. Well, we think it's a space that you can have a lot of fun in — and clearly John Legend and Chrissy Teigen think the same. Teigen and Legend's kitchen is dynamic, playful, and mature all at once. What especially stands out about it is the statement wall, which also acts as a backsplash. It's made of marble and creates a real sense of drama in the space.

Their custom bar is also made from the same marble, giving a mirroring effect and a sense of cohesion throughout. As for the colors, Teigen and Legend have embraced warm tones, with off-whites and browns dominating. It's all about the wall for us, though, which really brings the kitchen to life — and you can achieve this at home with a funky backsplash of your own.

It can be easy to shy away from industrial effects in kitchens, and we can understand why. If you go too heavy on it all, your kitchen can end up looking like it's sitting in the back of a restaurant, instead of a welcoming space that everyone wants to hang out in. You can easily achieve a solid balance, though, as singer and "Fast & Furious" star Tyrese Gibson has in his Atlanta home. Gibson's kitchen is a blend of industrial-level cabinetry and cooking appliances which make the space feel mature and fully functional, but it's all paired with softer lines and muted beiges and browns which stop things from getting too intense.

The centerpiece of Gibson's kitchen is a sizable island that houses the extensive array of dishes he serves when friends come over (prepared by his personal chef). In his tour of his house, conducted by Architectural Digest, Gibson reveals that the kitchen was decked out and paid for by the house's previous owners — a fact that he's thoroughly pleased about, as it saved him a fair bit of money. We're not surprised he's so thrilled!

If you've ever seen Troye Sivan's house, you'll know how utterly gorgeous it is. Sivan's Melbourne pad is the ultimate blend of industrial and soft, with a tasteful and organic color scheme throughout and natural light that floods every space, contrasting the moodiness of some of the walls and fixtures. Particularly impressive is his kitchen, which is a collage of industrial and raw materials, with the natural aspect ultimately winning out.

Sivan opts for wood for the breakfast counter and cabinetry in his minimalist kitchen, which creates a softness in what could be an otherwise quite gloomy space due to its lower ceilings. Instead of using metal or plastic for the stools, he opts for bamboo and wicker, with their curved nature again diminishing any sense of harshness and conjuring warmth. Everything's helped by the potted plants he has dotted around his kitchen, too, which bring the outside inside. If you can't afford to deck out your entire kitchen in wood, small touches here and there can give you a similar effect.

There's a lot to love about Vanessa Hudgens' home: Her airy but stylish living room, her ultra-funky breakfast nook complete with "White Lotus"-style wallpaper, and her colorful and elegant bedroom. Most of all, though, we love her kitchen. She remodeled her kitchen during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rustic, country-style cooking space is spacious and intimate at the same time. She was also keen to repurpose old materials in the creation of the space, with the black tiling on one wall leftover from the remodel of her bathroom.

What we particularly adore about the kitchen, though, is the open shelving. Instead of tucking away all of her glasses and crockery in cabinets, she displays them on sprawling shelves that run almost the entire length of the room. She also uses the shelves to house paintings and ornaments, which bring further style into the space. Using open shelving instead of upper cabinetry makes her kitchen feel way bigger (and it's already pretty huge), and it permits more light to come into the space. It's a vibe, folks!

Hollywood actor Bryce Dallas Howard's kitchen uses one of the oldest tricks in the book to make spaces seem bigger. In her New York cottage, Howard employs the clever use of mirrors in her kitchen, placing them in front of the cabinets on either side of the room. Adding these mirrors creates the reflection of the rest of the features in the kitchen, and therefore amplifies the sense of space in the whole cooking area. Plus, it prevents the room from feeling too long.

It must be said that Howard's house probably doesn't need this effect, considering that it's already humongous, but this is one of the easiest tricks that you can emulate in your own home. If your kitchen is in desperate need of remodeling, this is a particularly good design tip for smaller spaces that need a boost and to feel more roomy. The best part is, it's not particularly difficult to execute: You just need to attach some mirrored panels onto the front of your cabinets, and you're good to go.