Itty Bitty Blog: Decorating Cabinet Tops

We closed on our house almost exactly one year ago. I was thrilled to finally have a home of my own to decorate and re-decorate and re-decorate (I change decor almost as often as I change outfits). One of my most fun and challenging projects was decorating above the cabinets. And we have a lot of cabinets...

I browsed the internet for hours trying to find tips and ideas and inspirations for how to accomplish this without just making our rooms feel cluttered. And maybe my results do make the room feel cluttered to some people... but I love the cozy feel the rooms have when every space is decorated suitably.

In our yellow kitchen we have approximately 12-13 feet of upper cabinets and a small china hutch. Since we have 9-foot ceilings, the room looked so empty before I added any decorations to the tops of them. Here's the finished look:

thank you, iPhone panorama, for making my kitchen curved. also, ignore the tipped-over pitcher. i fixed that later...

I tried so many different arrangements (believe me, my end-of-pregnancy knees will testify to how many times I climbed up on those counters). I started with just a couple items, which looked extremely lonely and made me frown. As I added more and more stuff, I started feeling better and better... and so I ended up with substantially more embellishment than I originally intended.

Here are my main guidelines when arranging items anywhere in my house (on any type of shelving or counter or cabinet top):

1. Balance of color: I try to space items of similar color and darkness evenly throughout my display. I don't want all of the red pieces clustered together, because the display will look lopsided. Likewise, I would want all of my light-colored objects spaced evenly amongst the dark-colored ones. You want the viewer's eye to be drawn across the whole display and not fixate on one particular area.

2. Balance of size, shape and texture: Just like with color, you want your display to be even and balanced in terms of size and texture. Notice how my display above has pieces that almost alternate in height. I also spaced "rougher" or "natural" pieces evenly throughout the rest of my "shiny" and "smooth" pieces. I adore circular shapes (obviously), and I tried to balance the rounder shapes with the sharper/rectangular shapes.

see, that pitcher is upright again!

3. Spacing: In any type of artwork, spacing is crucial (and yes, decorating is a type of artwork!). Try to overlap pieces in ways that are complimentary: for example, I overlapped this circular twig wreath over a rectangular frame to add dimension and balance out the roundness of the wooden lantern.

this is in my family room, atop our entertainment center

Spacing is also all about creating "clusters" of items. It's usually a good rule of thumb to cluster in odd-numbered groups (larger than 1. And probably fewer than 11). I break this rule all the time, though. Generally, odd-numbered groupings are more pleasing to the eye because of balance (wink, wink!) but this sense of balance can also be obtained with even-numbered groupings if you do it right.

4 items grouped together that feel balanced

3 items grouped together that feel balanced

Here is the panorama of my entertainment center. I don't pay any attention to the total number of items used (that number is irrelevant) but the overall feel of the finished look.

don't judge the quality of the picture. that top shelf is NOT wavy in real life!

4. Be creative: I did not have all these items just lying around the house when I began this project. I was given several hand-me-downs from my mom (baskets, pitchers) and found some amazing pieces at thrift stores. I also made some, like this tray and the blue vases in my family room.

Don't be afraid to think outside the box. Above you can see three picture frames. One has a traditionally lovely black and white photograph of Little J. The other two? One is a piece of framed wrapping paper. The other is a zebra print fabric scrap.

I also had to be a little creative with my kitchen display, because the molding on top of our cabinets is really tall. So pieces were partially covered up when set directly on the cabinets. I used a little creative resourcefulness to prop them up: