After the group had gone, Michael returned to working on the kitchen, and I to writing and recipe testing. Michael installed the butcher’s work-bench, then proceeded to expand on it for the centre island. The butcher block top, which was about five feet long, had fissures in it the size of the Grand Canyon. We had bathed it with water for months, hoping the wood would expand, but the spaces remained. Michael cut the block into three pieces, which he trimmed and evened off, then stuck back together to make a shorter, smoother cutting surface. It still had small cracks in it, which Michael filled with beeswax, a food-friendly, aesthetically pleasing solution. We wanted the front of this graceful piece of furniture, with its two deep, curved drawers, to be what people saw when they entered the kitchen, so Michael put them facing forward. He built a frame that widened the piece and set the butcher block atop it at the back, on the stove side.
We hadn’t determined what our counter-tops would be. We’d tried poured concrete for the surfaces in the temporary kitchen, but it hadn’t held up as well as we’d hoped, and we’d also tried tile, which I found an unfriendly work surface, and hard to clean. We were considering all kinds of things when Michael came home from a materials buying trip one afternoon, excited about some end-lots of marble he’d seen. We went to take a look.
Here again, a limited budget worked in our favour. We wouldn’t have tried so many surfaces, nor looked so hard if we could have just gone out and purchased what we wanted. Thanks to Michael always looking for ways to make the budget stretch, here was a beautiful solution in the form of huge, polished squares of a marble that was luminous with ochre, dark pink, grey and a tinge of bluish green.
With the marble chosen, Michael could continue with the centre island. He first rounded the edges of the squares, then installed them opposite the butcher block. He incorporated a small sink to the right of the butcher block for washing vegetables, and underneath it he built two drawers, one for rubbish and the other for compost. He incorporated other drawers into the island, too, to accommodate all the paraphernalia of a family kitchen, from first-aid kit to napkins and bibs. In the centre of the island, between the wood and the marble, Michael inserted a wooden knife-holder that was flush with the surface. My knives fitted down into it, their blades separated by adjustable wooden pegs. Over the island he installed a beautiful, art deco chandelier we’d purchased several years before, which was, we discovered when we got it home, signed by the Frères Mueller from Lunéville, in Alsace.
We wanted to tile the entire twelve-foot-long back wall of the kitchen, as a backdrop for the gas stove. I wanted to use handmade tiles we’d seen in the Marais area of Paris, which came in a beautiful blanc cassé, soft white. We brought two of them home and set them on the counter, more as a tease than anything else, for their price would eat up the whole of the rest of our kitchen budget. Michael came home with many other tile samples, but none of them looked good next to those from the Marais. One day, though, he found some industrially made tiles he liked, and I went with him to take a look. They were nice and irregular, with a good shine and rich colour. We decided to use them, and Michael made the wall look as good as it would have with the tiles from the Marais, by mixing white and off-white to give the wall depth and subtle texture.
I wanted my copper pots to hang somewhere in the kitchen, both for the warmth their colour would add and for practicality, but we couldn’t figure out where to put them. I didn’t want them over the butcher block because they would block the view of the stove and the mantel, and our chandelier looked so graceful there. I couldn’t hang them against the tile wall because the counter top was too deep for them to be within easy reach.
I stood at the stove and reached up, as though reaching for a pot. I realized that if they hung inside the hood Michael had built, along the sides, they would not only look beautiful but would also be accessible to me yet out of the way. This is where they hang today, a perfect solution.
Michael built all the cabinets in the kitchen, which include twenty-two long drawers, each of which slides out to its full length. One of my favourite and most useful drawers is the tall, narrow one that sits next to the stove and is used to store baking sheets and odd-shaped baking pans. In this kitchen I would have the luxury of space and storage that I could only have imagined in kitchens of yore.
Michael laid a beautiful floor in half the kitchen that consisted of the ancient tiles he’d pulled up from the original kitchen floor, some old six-sided terracotta tiles called tommettes that had come from the hallway behind the kitchen, and small squares he cut from the marble that covered the counter-tops. The area where I would spend most of my time, between the stove and butcher block, the refrigerator and the sink, was floored with buttery old pine planks he’d lifted from the house’s original sitting room. They would be much kinder than tile or stone to my legs and back.
I’d wanted stone sinks like those in old farms and chateaux, but we didn’t find one easily and I wasn’t so devoted to the idea that I would go to any lengths to have one. I’ve always liked stainless steel, so Michael went about looking for a stainless steel sink that fitted the dimensions we wanted, long and wide enough to hold the removable pan under the stove burners, and shallow enough for ease and comfort. Needless to say, such a sink was nowhere to be found or ordered.
This was a puzzler. I didn’t want to compromise on the shape of the sink – it had to be practical and easy to use. I didn’t want porcelain because it is fussy to maintain. Michael heard about a place where he could get any size stainless steel sink, and a friend of ours said that he could intervene and get it wholesale. Michael handed in the sink’s dimensions and got a call back the following week with an estimate that sent him through the roof. ‘Five thousand dollars for a stainless steel sink?’ he said, shaking his head. Apparently, the sink would have to be custom-made, which is what made it so costly. Like the handmade tiles, the handmade stainless steel sink would have to go.
How would we get around this one? Michael had lined a wall in our downstairs bathroom with zinc, just for fun, and he’d loved working with it. One night I heard him soldering in his workshop and I looked in to see him fashioning a zinc box. ‘It’s a sink,’ he said shortly. The next day he brought it to show me. ‘If this thing holds water, this is what our sinks will look like,’ he said. ‘It should work – zinc lasts forever. Just look at all the zinc bars in French cafes.’ He filled it with water and it was watertight. Our sink problem was solved, sort of. He had to figure out how to put in a plug and how to support it, which he did, and the upshot is that we have three custom-made zinc sinks in our kitchen, which are burnished and lovely, and easy to maintain.
With the sinks in place, the drawers all built, the floors laid, Michael could install the yards of marble. He studied all the squares to choose those with the most ochre in them, and the most harmonious patterns. He tried them out on the counters to see how the light fell on them, then carefully rounded their edges before setting them in place. He had fashioned a narrow ledge at the back of the counter-tops on either side of the stove for condiments, timers, knick-knacks, all the little things that clutter a work surface, and he cut small pieces of marble to fit that. When all was installed he had to figure out how to polish and treat it so it would hold up to kitchen use.
We both got on the phone to do some research. Mine led me to an Italian family of masons in Paris; they were very generous with information and offered to have Michael come in so they could give him a marble-treating demonstration. Michael’s research led him to the headstone makers in Louviers. Between these sources, he got the information he needed. The results turned the marble smooth and luscious, and made the colours, which are warm and complementary to food, flowers and people, emerge. A visitor, looking at the marble, said, ‘Do you realize people go to school just to learn how to cut and polish marble and he just did it?’
I had heard that marble was hard to maintain and very delicate, and I wondered how it would hold up to the kind of use I would give it. I needn’t have worried, as it has proved to be low maintenance and very forgiving. Even acid, which eats away at its surface leaving a rough white spot, isn’t as much of a problem as I feared, for those rough spots go away with regular wiping.
The stoves were installed, the counter-tops finished, the drawers ready to