Dakota Johnson’s green kitchen has been on every home account for months. Deep, warm, rich green everywhere. The kind of space that clearly cost real money to pull off, and clearly needed a professional to design it.
Lyric and Chantelle of Casa Garnish saw that kitchen and decided they wanted the same feeling in their own place. The problem was, their kitchen looked nothing like it. In their own words, it was “your classic old kitchen with gray walls and wood cabinets and standard granite countertops.” Lifeless. Beige. Nothing.
Most people would have given up on the idea right there. You can’t turn a plain rental into Dakota Johnson’s kitchen. That would take a full remodel, a contractor, and thousands of dollars they didn’t have.
They copied it anyway. Green cabinets. Warm wood countertops. A statement fridge you can’t stop looking at. A space Chantelle now describes as “like a set you’d see on a cooking show.”
The whole thing cost them less than $200 (about €185). It took two days. And they finished it before they even moved in.
The kitchen they started with
Picture it. Gray walls. Medium-wood cabinets. Granite counters in that speckled beige-brown that came standard in every apartment built around 2016. A stainless sink. A white fridge. Beige tile backsplash.
It’s the exact kitchen millions of Americans live in right now. Nothing is broken. Nothing is ugly, exactly. It’s just… nothing.
Chantelle and Lyric didn’t want to tear it apart. They just wanted it to feel like theirs. So they made a list of what actually bothered them, and it came down to three things: the color of the cabinets, the color of the counters, and the plain white fridge.
What most couples would have done
The usual move is easy to picture. Rip out the cabinets, or at least put new doors on them. Swap the granite for wood or quartz. Trade the fridge for a fancy stainless one. That’s a $10,000 to $25,000 (about €9,200 to €23,000) project depending on the size of the kitchen, and it’s weeks of work.
Lyric and Chantelle didn’t do any of that. They didn’t take out a single cabinet. They didn’t touch the counters. They didn’t buy a new fridge. The stove, the sink, the backsplash, and every appliance stayed exactly where they were.
And the finished kitchen still looks like a full remodel.
The two-day window
They set one rule for themselves. Whatever they did, it had to be done before they moved in. No living around a half-finished kitchen, no weekend-by-weekend project that drags on for months, no waiting on a contractor’s schedule. Two days. That was it.
Two days isn’t enough time to install cabinets, or have counters cut and delivered, or shop for a new fridge. And a $180 (about €165) budget rules all of that out anyway. A single sheet of real wood countertop costs more than their whole makeover did.
So they came at the whole thing from a completely different angle. Not the one most design blogs teach. Not one any contractor would ever suggest. It only works if you stop thinking of a kitchen as something you rebuild, and start thinking of it as something you dress up instead.
The trick they used on every surface
Here’s the part that stops most people. They didn’t replace anything in the kitchen. They covered everything they didn’t like.
The cabinets got painted, not replaced. After going back and forth on greens, they landed on Sherwin-Williams “Garden Spot” for the cabinet doors and Behr “Fresh Artichoke” for the walls. Two specific colors you can grab at a paint store tomorrow. That took care of the boring cabinets and the gray walls in one weekend.
The counters got contact paper, not stone. The warm wood-looking countertops in every “after” photo? They’re not wood. They’re stick-on paper made to look like a butcher block (contact paper is a thin peel-and-stick sheet). Chantelle and Lyric had used the same product in a previous kitchen, and in their words, “it held up exceptionally well.” A roll costs about the same as a takeout dinner, not the hundreds real wood would run.
The fridge got stickers, not a trade-in. They kept thinking about a Nene Leakes line: “Oh, not a white refrigerator.” So instead of buying a new fridge, they covered the old white one in pink cow-print vinyl stickers.
The hardware got swapped for cheap knobs. Bright orange cabinet knobs replaced the plain originals, and that one small swap looks like a designer touch in every photo.
Two paint colors. One roll of contact paper. A pack of stickers. A set of orange knobs. $180 (about €165). Two days.
Why it doesn’t look cheap
The reason this looks like a real remodel and not a Pinterest fail is that they picked one clear color story and stuck with it everywhere. Green walls, deeper green cabinets, warm wood counters, pink and orange as the small pops. Every surface either fits that color story or gets covered until it does.
Two honest warnings. Contact paper works best on smooth, dry counters, not right next to a sink where water splashes. And painted cabinets need clean prep, a coat of primer, and full dry time between coats, or the paint peels within a year.
If your kitchen’s layout works, skip the remodel. You need a weekend, $180 (about €165), and the guts to cover what you don’t like.
