Designing
A Cook's Collection
At Lydia Shire's house, the best stuff's in the pantry.
Lydia Shire, a chef who owns the restaurants Scampo and Locke-Ober in Boston and Blue Sky in York, Maine, loves the colorful light-filled kitchen in her 1847 Weston home, and she loves everything in it. There's the red Chambers stove from the 1940s that "makes chocolate cake better than any modern one could" and the old English butcher block. "I'm an incurable carnivore," she says. "I love to think of all the happy carcasses that met their demise here."
There's also the enormous framed 1930s poster from Prunier, a fish restaurant in Paris, the copper table found at Brimfield, the concrete countertop inlaid with random pieces of glass, and the Italian red-glass chandelier that reminds her of "a big red octopus." But most prized of all is Shire's collection of culinary objects.
These treasures are housed in the pantry, a room within her kitchen with walls made from two-ply laminated glass sandwiching a layer of mesh, so they're sheer but still provide some cover. Inside, the shelves are brimming with, well, everything a cook could imagine.
There are specialized tools like the antique pastry crimper with Bakelite handle that Shire uses to create a "beautiful zigzag edge" on pappardelle pasta, the knife she uses to chop parsley, and the espresso maker from the 1950s that gets heated on the stove. Shire's eclectic finds, which are mixed in with a more traditional cache of silver serving pieces and copper molds and pans, include all sorts of pig and devil tchotchkes, retro cocktail shakers, Venetian martini glasses, a collection of candy boxes, and a bridal couple she used on her daughter's wedding cake. There's also a charming collection of miniature toy stoves -- one even lights up and gets warm. She used them recently as table centerpieces for a shower she hosted.
Naturally, she's got stacks of dishes, too, from signed editions found at a Berlin flea market to plates she uses only to serve game dinners. "My mission in life is to have 12 of everything, because my dining room table seats 12."
Looks as if she's well on her way.
Marni Elyse Katz blogs about design at stylecarrot.com. Send comments to designing@globe.com.
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