Kitchen Essential

Plate racks are great inventions. Mistakenly many people think of them purely for draining plates and so on, when their function is as much to do with easy access and storage. Having designed around ten different versions, I am beginning to get to grips with their problems as well as advantages.

Initially I started off by holding the plates in position with dowels at the back and location slots at the front. This allows the rack to be used for thick pottery plates and soup plates. A little more care is required when storing the plates because you have to fit the plate into the front slot.

A second type has vertical dowels at both the front and the back. This makes ’slamming’ in the plates easier, but soup plates, pottery plates or plates with deep rims or flanges will be too thick, unless the gap between the dowels is widened to such an extent that you need an inordinately wide plate rack which does not store too many plates. A third type with dowels on both the back and floor is hard to make satisfactorily and I am currently experimenting with it. There are a number of failures on sale in kitchen shops.

Plate racks are potentially exciting examples of wooden engineering and can be tremendously rich visually because of the element of repetition, the shadows between the parts, the minutiae of the different pieces and the compacting of storage into a confined area. The china and crockery stored in them are often great to look at and use. So the racks are becoming increasingly popular and are part of the move away from the boxed-in, ‘over-cupboarded‘ kitchen.

Teak is the wood used (with a suitable natural oil finish) where the plates sit especially on the horizontal elements. All constituent parts are designed for water to run off at angles, especially the horizontal ones such as the front and back bars in which the slots are made. I have also used teak on the sloping trays in which the cups and bowls sit with suitable run-off grooves. In other kitchens, expanded stainless steel sheet has proved useful because draining water passes between the rim of the cups and the surface.

The other parts can be any hard wood or metal where appropriate. To have easy-access, open storage seems better than stacking all the china in cupboards, especially if it is in everyday use. Piles of plates need room above them so large amounts of space can be wasted, and they can easily get chipped.

The problem with plate racks is the multiplicity of different sizes and thicknesses of plates. It is impossible to find one design that fits all plates. The design may be adjustable to some extent or you may have to find plates to suit. Either way, the racks are worth making an effort to use.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Plate Racks, great inventions in Kitchenware

• Conquering Clutter
• Where would we be without crockery?
• Instant Kitchen Styles
• The Fine China Cutlery Collection
• THE ABC OF COOKWARE Part 1
• Conquering Clutter (continue...)
• Spice up your Kitchen with Colour (Seaside Chic, Contemporary,Provencal Country & Industrial)
• THE ABC OF COOKWARE Part 2
• Special Dishes for a Particular Food
• Food Served Everyday Occasions, serve Food in a Pleasurable and Enjoyable way

Trackback URI | Comments RSS