When I left the hotel business I made a vow that I had done enough entertaining to last the rest of my life; therefore my kitchen nowadays is something of a sanctuary. It’s where I test dishes and prepare our everyday food, but rarely open to visitors.
That being said, it’s a lovely, light-filled space, and for anyone interested, here’s a guided tour.
Entry is via a glazed swing door, restaurant-style. I’m friendly with a retired signwriter, so almost all our doors bear amusing legends. The kitchen leads out onto the roof deck – hence ‘lanai’, which is what the Golden Girls called their deck, and that’s good enough for me.
It’s a heavy door which required such energetic springs to open and close that we lived in terror of it catching a cat’s tail; it’s now been adjusted to do so slowly and gently.
As further insurance against injuring Benjamin and Maxim, a vintage cast iron doorstop.
Some people keep cookbooks on their kitchen bookshelves but we have Robert’s collection of Action Men. We’re not sure what they get up to when the lights are turned out but they’re never in the same formation as when we left them.
I could have tidied up our noticeboard for the purposes of this photograph, but this is it au naturel.
I’ve always had a blackboard in the kitchen so I can jot things down the moment we run out, to add to my shopping list. Less practical is the Ben Cohen calendar lower left – the days of the month are all but invisible; though I guess that’s not the point.
The kitchen opens out onto our roofdeck (lanai) and last year we had a skylight installed to allow more light in.
A catflap allows the boys to come and go as they wish. The climbing plant is Hoya carnosa, which has twined itself around my Aeolian harp. This is a musical instrument, much loved in the Romantic era but now extremely rare, which is played by the wind. In our case, the wind needs to be gusting from the east – I will record the sound one day (it is remarkable and haunting) and post it here on my website.
The kitchen was handmade by Chalon Kitchens in Somerset, which sadly no longer exists. We recently had it repainted and it’s as good as new.
The super-comfortable stools are from www.nkuku.com – a fabulous Devon-based design company – and were made in India. If you’re ever in the Totnes/Dartmouth direction the shop is dreamy.
The hurricane lamp came from Villeroy & Boch.
Our kitchen designer described this as a ‘housekeeper cupboard’. The oven is by Neff; it’s adequate but to my chagrin doesn’t heat evenly back to front (show me an oven that does).
Behind the doors are Liebherr fridge and freezer, microwave, lots of storage and – cunningly attached to the inside of a cupboard door – a slimline TV.
This unit has a narrow ventilation gap at the back. Benjamin has discovered he can jump up here, so we’ve closed it in with a steel grille; otherwise, if he fell into the gap we’d have to get builders in to extract him.
Someone dubbed our kitchen ‘the murder room’ because of the pictures we’ve hung here. As well as this original poster, we have Robert’s collection of Sweeney Todd pictures. He’s a distinguished literary figure: bestselling author of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, as well as an Arabian Nights scholar and the biographer of Thomas Gray.
My top kitchen tip is: have the biggest sink you can. Ours is 54 x 40cm. The worktop is African black granite, supplied by Landford Stone in Dorset.
Most cats love scratching so we had this giant scratching post made by www.scratchycats.com right here in Devon.
Behind it you can see the Aeolian harp in more detail. It is on a spring so it can be folded out to catch the incoming draught.
Thank you for visiting.
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