How to make your pantry look A-list
The interior designer Vicky Charles (charlesandco.com) has designed a fair few high-end kitchens in her time. You may have spotted one of them all over social media recently, when Victoria Beckham posted a video of husband David and their daughter Harper making burritos together in the kitchen of their Cotswolds home – one of Charles’s projects. She has designed three homes for Gordon and Tana Ramsay, and her celebrity clientele also includes George and Amal Clooney, Emma Stone, and Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, plus other actors and musicians she’s not at liberty to mention.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Charles – who is British but now based in the US, and has projects there and around Europe – is increasingly being asked to incorporate a statement pantry within kitchen designs, where the look is almost as important as the functionality.
“The pantry and the utility are not seen as secondary spaces as much anymore; they’re now becoming the rooms where you can have the fun of design if you can commit to it,” she says. “It’s like the powder room in comparison to the master bathroom; it’s got more expressive and creative. We tend to do a fun wallpaper or paint colour.”
Although the designer pantry is by no means a new trend, it seems to have had a boost of late here in the UK: searches for “dream pantry” are up 100 per cent year on year on Pinterest, and Google searches for “pantry storage” are up 12 per cent. Charles’s theory for this intense continued interest in pantries is that, post-Covid, we are using our homes, and particularly our kitchens, in different ways.
“We’re in our homes more, and we’re working from home more, so we’re putting more stuff away,” she says. “Different members of the family are using the kitchen at different times of the day; you might be sitting at the kitchen counter doing a Zoom call, so those extra hidden spaces are becoming more necessary. For us, the pantry has become the new walk-in wardrobe – you really deep-dive into how somebody lives when you design one.”
She tends to find out very early on in the design process whether a client is someone who is likely to cook a lot. “When you start to talk to someone about their dream home, if they cook, obviously they just want to talk about the kitchen straight away. If they don’t, they’re talking about the closet, or the living room.”
At a recent holiday house project she worked on in Italy, for example, there’s a kitchen with a secret door that looks like a fridge door but actually leads into a back kitchen pantry, with a separate entrance from the garden, where a chef can come in to cater for guests.
And then there’s the client who loved to bake as a hobby, and requested a self-contained bakery in her home, complete with display space for cake stands, cookie cutters and sprinkles, so that all her baking supplies and equipment would be close at hand and easy to find.
Most of the time, though, it’s a case of practicality, and having a space away from the main kitchen, in which you might be working or entertaining, where you can stash the necessary but unsightly elements of family life: appliances that otherwise clutter the worktop, back-up food supplies that take up storage, and perhaps an extra dishwasher or sink.
“I think the best advice for anybody moving house or designing a new kitchen is, once they’ve got a rough drawing, to stand in their current kitchen, look at what they have in it, and work out where does the cling-film drawer go in my new kitchen? Where does my nonsense drawer of string and pens go?” (Even the 1 per cent, she says, have “nonsense drawers” in their homes.)
“You need to look at where you want to stand in the kitchen when you’re cooking, the orientation of the kitchen within the room. If you cook a lot, for instance, it’s a good idea to have a separate drinks station with a fridge, a sink and the coffee machine, so that people don’t get in the way while you’re cooking. All of that really dictates how much countertop you have left, and whether you need that back-up pantry for extra space,” she continues.
The checklist for the ultimate pantry includes a second dishwasher and sink, a fridge-freezer, space for appliances, bins, and a wall oven or steam oven. “Whereas the stove is a pretty showpiece in a custom colour with a hood, and it’s the focus of the kitchen, the wall oven tends to go in the pantry, and the microwave definitely goes in the pantry,” notes Charles.
In terms of food storage, she will specify shallow shelving around the walls so that everything can be seen easily and jars and cans don’t get lost at the back, and vegetable drawers, where vegetables can be kept in the dark but not in the fridge. Don’t forget table linens and tableware; Charles will source all the linens, cutlery, plates and cups her clients might need. “It depends on how they like their coffee, whether they use pots or machines, all the stuff that goes around that; and then you get to the tea set-up, and how many people they like to entertain; it goes on and on, and you have to think about how to store all that.”
Then, of course, there are the requirements for pets: take a leaf out of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’s book. They have a dog-feeding station with food and water bowls inset into a shelf below the stone counter-top, with storage drawers for dog food above.
The pet station will often be in the utility room, which is another concern altogether, and one that is a staple of the American homes Charles works on. “It blows Americans’ minds that British people have the washing machine in the kitchen,” she says.
She believes the best place for a laundry room (that doesn’t also cater for pets) is upstairs, and again, functionality is key: “If the washing machine and the dryer are positioned one on top of the other, you need a pull-out shelf in between so that you pull all the washing out on to the shelf. Laundry baskets on wheels can be stored under the counter top, with a curtain that can be pulled over to hide them. And there needs to be a drying rack over the sink, an outlet for the Dyson to charge, a pull-down ironing board and a plug socket set high up for the iron, so you don’t get caught up in the wire.”
For these secret spaces, whether a pantry or a laundry, the key is to be realistic about how much of your time at home is taken up with cooking or laundry, and focus your attention and budget accordingly – even if you’re the only one who is ever going to see it.
Charles’s tip is to experiment with a colour or a finish that you might not want all over the house but that’s fun to have in small doses. “A red pantry, for instance, would be so fun, but you wouldn’t probably want that in the main kitchen area, because the look there should be more connected to the rest of the house,” she says. “The pantry or utility can still be connected in terms of the design aesthetic, but you can really ramp it up.
“And why shouldn’t it be fun? The more opportunity you have to bring a sense of humour into the design, the better.”