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When Leah Ring selected Benjamin Moore’s Summer Blue for Katie Szymanski’s Los Angeles kitchen, she didn’t do it because she thought the hue was on trend. It was more so a psychological experiment. The interior designer behind Another Human fully believes that color has the power to affect us emotionally. This swatch felt like one that would make her client, a therapist and entrepreneur, feel happy and energized every day (and it did!). But she didn’t know then what we know now: The periwinkle shade is popping up in heaps of other kitchens, too.

The kitchen Leah Ring designed for Katie Szymanski. | Photography by Laure Joliet; Styling by Joie Einstein

Swift Direct Blinds, a U.K.-based window-treatment supplier, recently looked at Google search data and found that periwinkle kitchen cabinets are rising in popularity, with a year-on-year increase of almost 400 percent. Just don’t get that confused with the actual most popular cabinet colors: White, unsurprisingly, is the top choice for kitchens, followed by black and blue. We suspect periwinkle’s surge is an offshoot of the latter. Over the past year, we’ve started to see shades of baby blue and cornflower blue pop up in more and more kitchens, so it only makes sense that slight variations in the color—like one with stronger notes of violet—are starting to capture people’s curiosity. 

From the handful of periwinkle-hued kitchens we’ve seen, including the Stockholm apartment designed by Westblom Krasse Arkitektkontor (pictured above), the purplish blue color pairs perfectly with pale yellow (in both wall paint and backsplash tile form). Plus, as with most up-and-coming design trends we feel a little skeptical about at first, if we see the Swedes are doing it, then we know it’s worth trying. 

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