The following code works as expected, presenting a red background button (with lots of padding) in a green background frame (also with lots of padding). Note that Frame padding is specified both in the Style statement and the ttk.Frame initialization.
import ttk import Tkinter root = Tkinter.Tk() ttk.Style().configure("TFrame", background="#0c0", padding=60) ttk.Style().configure("TButton", background="#c00", padding=20) frame = ttk.Frame(root, padding=60) frame.pack() btn = ttk.Button(frame, text="Button") btn.pack() root.mainloop() Now, however, remove the 'padding=60' line from the Frame initialization (i.e., frame = ttk.Frame(root)), leaving it only in the Style().configure(...) statement, and the window that pops up has no padding in the Frame (and therefore you can't tell what the background color is either). Instead there's just the red background button taking up the whole window. The frame padding has reverted to the default of 0 in spite of the Style statement.
Why is the padding specified for style "TFrame" ignored? The other attribute ("background") is correctly applied to the Frame, and both the padding and background attributes are correctly applied to the Button using the TButton style.