I lived without a kitchen for years. My first apartment had a cave like enclosure I never set foot in, not even to use the fridge; my second had a bullet hole in one of the windows no one ever fixed (it was New York). My third had two electric burners I never turned on, not even once. My fourth had one burner and a minifridge into which the soon-to-be father of my child peered disbelievingly one Sunday afternoon, beholding a bag of coffee and a bottle of vodka. “I don’t suppose you can cook,” he said.
I lied to him of course, and a day or two later I put together a meal at his house we ended up tossing steaming hot in the trash. I think it was some type of rice.
His kitchen, meanwhile, was nothing short of palatial. It had a stove with four gas burners. It had an actual oven. It had two sinks right next to each other. It had pots and pans and kitchen knives of high carbon steel. It had a pasta machine. It had an asparagus steamer—a tall thing I studied in the deepest silence without daring to ask what it was.
This was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I’d been posted as a correspondent by a U.S. daily. I wrote some features, I pitched some profiles, but mostly I spent my time figuring out how to get to the frontline of conflicts that had just exploded or had been raging for years. I was gone for weeks, sometimes for months, and every time I came back, the kitchen was always there: a reminder of all that was good in this world.
I began to cook to feel normal, to bring about the sense that I might one day be in a position to offer something to somebody. I had an image in my head of a great gathering—happy people sitting at a table—and me walking in with some towering dish, making everybody even happier. I came close, but then I lost the kitchen.
My next kitchen was half-a-world away in New Mexico. I’ll never forget it. It had these saltillo tiles on the counters. I remember calling my landlord and asking him what the grimy stuff between the tiles was. “Grout,” he said.
“What’s it made out of?”
“Grout,” was the answer.
I made a mental note.
I’d lost the marriage but I had the child. I designed a dining table to the exact proportions of the kitchen and my daughter and I lived at that table, in that kitchen, quite happily for years. We had breakfast, we had dinner, we did homework, we carved pumpkins, we cut paper stars for the Christmas tree, we built a miniature Parthenon and won some contest that way.
Then came the move across the country to Maine, to a kitchen with clashing colors and materials—steel countertops here, butcherblock countertops there, ceramic tiles on one end, wood slats on the other.
I made a second mental note.
Finally came a windfall, and a streak of exceptional luck. I bought a little place in the West End of Portland— so little that I had a substantial chunk left over for a complete remodel.
The first piece of luck came in the form of a contractor born to rule over the vague and the undisciplined, which at that point included myself. Heather Thomson of Juniper Design + Build had made a name for herself as “expensive but worth it,” as she later put it. I did not know that. All I knew was that she was a woman and therefore worth her weight in gold. She was quick to give me a figure. I was quick to agree to it. Next came the second piece of extraordinary luck. She appointed Chris Dudley, a precision woodworker of unparalleled skill, as her field lieutenant. She called him Dudley and rang him several times a day to see how things were going.
Dudley was a Zen master—nothing fazed him—but the place was a mess. We had gutted it completely. Demolished the kitchen, destroyed the bathroom, opened the walls for new plumbing, ripped open the ceiling for new wiring: like a marauding army we’d laid waste to every inch of the apartment. I failed to see how both Heather and Dudley could stay calm in the presence of such chaos but they did. Every day, without fail.
Under their stewardship, order began to rise out of disorder.
Nowhere was this miracle more visible than in the kitchen, where the two mental notes I’d made—no grout, and total uniformity of materials and color—came together purely thanks to Dudley’s OCD. I had chosen a thermo- laminate for the countertops engineered by Arpa Industriale in Italy. The laminate didn’t look like a laminate, it didn’t feel like a laminate, and it did not behave like a laminate. You could put a torch to a sheet 1/10th of an inch thick and nothing would happen. You could attack it with an axe and nothing would happen. The manipulation of atoms through a process known as nanotechnology created an indestructible surface with a smooth matte finish. We never figured out what devilry the Italians cooked up, but Dudley spent endless days in Heather’s wood shop on Peaks Island cutting it to perfection. (Later he admitted the job was “a bit hectic.”)
I had by then come to a separate decision. I did not want cabinets. The space, 10 foot by 10, was too small. Heather had shelves made locally. We were now up against the eternal problem of storage. We had done away with the L-shaped design and agreed on a central island in which I would keep all my cookware. Heather said I needed 36 inches minimum between the island and the walls, but I was raised in Rome, where the average kitchen is microscopic and the clearances she wanted practically a crime. I needed a large island with sufficient storage. Luckily, Heather had a million other things going on. She was running three crews for three other projects, Dudley was studiedly neutral on the subject, so in the end I won. Much later, in passing, Heather said, “It totally worked. We gained a lot of functionality,” and I just about fell off my chair.
I thought long and hard about the floor. I didn’t want wood. I didn’t like tile. In the end, I chose the type of rubber flooring you see in airports. I’d seen it at a friend’s house in New York but I also knew from working on a restaurant line how forgiving rubber can be.
They came for dinner when the work was done. Heather brought Mario, whose marinara sauce is second to none. Dudley brought a different Heather, his wife. I plied them all with drink and got them to sit at my new table, directly across the kitchen they had wrested out of chaos. And yes, I made an entrance with a towering dish.
They might not remember it, but I do. ▪
