Kitchen Essential

Inlay provides an ideal source of decoration in a kitchen. It helps to focus the eye, emphasize lines either horizontal or vertical and enhance the randomness of wood by contrast to its crisp geometry; it is relatively inexpensive to make and easy to clean. Inlay creates structural order in the absence of traditional panel-frame construction. What could be more ideal. Every kitchen could use some. A few guidelines though may be helpful. Consider using it rather like icing on a cake: too much and the impact is lessened, but too little or the wrong scale or size and the result is weak or pointless.

The size of inlay needs to alter according to the job it is doing. For use vertically it is operating as a column and so a larger size is appropriate, perhaps with a directional pattern as opposed to a static one such as simple squares.

Inlay was first used in the sixteenth century primarily for denoting the panel or surface to be decorated either with carving or marquetry, the latter in particular after veneered furniture was introduced in the reign of Charles II. Giant inlay patterns were also used to provide an alternative to carving, perhaps on grounds of cost, on court cupboards, in horizontal elements in preference to mouldings.

It seems there was a gap in its use until the eighteenth century when Chippendale and others used it in fine elegant sections to suit the delicate neo-classical furniture of the time. After this time marquetry and inlay were to a large extent superseded by painting.

I find the early medieval inlay more relevant because the furniture was bolder and the inlay more interesting for being enlarged to the point where its complexity is enjoyable at a distance as well as close up. The scale of a kitchen — which is in essence a room set rather than a series of single pieces of furniture — calls for a more purposeful and vigorous type of decoration.

Inlay has been in the doldrums when it came back into use for a short period, in particular to give definition and structure to veneered surfaces in the absence of traditional panel and frame construction. Endless sheets of veneered boards with the grain going in one direction lose the pleasurable structure of solid timber panelling with the evidence of joints, grain direction and colour changes inherent in traditional furniture-making methods. Inlay allows you to have a purpose or a defined area for different grain directions and to highlight changes in plane. The sheer satisfying quality of the repetition of a complex geometric pattern — one of the fundamental principles behind decoration — should not go unmentioned, nor its execution by the craftsmen who make it. Admiration of skilled work is an undoubted pleasure.

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