Spoon rack. Jason Thigpen made this rack to store a variety of handmade spoons. The pegs for the spoons are made of white oak shaped by hand with a block plane, then installed using the tapered mortise-and-tenon tooling from Lee Valley. The 3/8” tapered tenon tool is used in this case and the pegs are angled upwards by about 5° to help the spoons stay on. (Jason says that if he built another spoon rack in the future, he would probably increase that to about 10°.) The base of the spoon rack is pecan harvested from a dead tree Jason felled just outside of his family’s yard. The spoon rack is mounted by means of keyhole slots in the back. Jason Thigpen, Texas Heritage Woodworks
The following is excerpted from Nancy R. Hiller‘s “Kitchen Think” – a book I’ve been consulting almost daily as I work on the plans/design/dreams for the pantry and kitchen in my 1905 house. But every time I look at it, I tear up a bit. I am still reeling from the fact that I can’t just send a few pictures Nancy’s way and ask for her opinion and advice. But I’m far sorrier that I can’t just sit down with her for a drink and a good gab about our gardens, pets and other seemingly inconsequential things that mean so much. I miss her singular and joyous laugh – and everything else Nancy.
– Fitz
No book titled “Kitchen Think” would be complete without a variety of miscellaneous objects the inspiration for that title connotes. Here’s a smattering of suggestions for details that are practical and fun.
Adaptation of an adaptation. Megan Fitzpatrick built this tiger maple plate rack based on adaptations to an original design by Johnny Grey that had been developed by Nancy Hiller and Kelly Mehler in the course of planning the kitchen Kelly shares with his wife, Teri. It’s made to fit Megan’s dinnerware; the depth and central shelf heights accommodate her various plates, and the racks are removable, which makes the unit flexible for other uses. The top shelves in the two side sections are adjustable. Al Parrish, courtesy ofActive Interest Media
Homage to my first employer. In our former kitchen, I built a plate rack inspired by the kitchen dressers I made for Roy Griffiths at Crosskeys Joinery in the early 1980s. This one is made in cypress. The built-in cabinets are ash with salvaged hardware. The counter is green-black soapstone. Spectrum Creative Group
Possibly the world’s most influential plate rack. Johnny Grey designed this plate rack for the kitchen in his family’s home. The sides are cherry, but the rails and dowels are teak. If you’re planning to use a plate rack for its historical purpose, to drain dishes, it’s important to use a water-resistant species for all parts that will regularly get wet. Benedict Grey Photography
Utensil rack & knife holder. Jenni Wilkinson mounted a tool bar over her stove to keep cooking utensils handy.
Second sink. If you have enough room, a second sink can be very handy. These clients added a small second sink between the main part of their kitchen and the dining room. Spectrum Creative Group
Wine column. My clients and I planned this wall of cabinetry around an awkward structural element. Along with the fridge and microwave, it houses a trash pullout. With just a few inches of width to spare, the clients suggested incorporating a set of shelves for wine. Spectrum Creative Group
Pet feeding station. Instead of buying a generic feeding station for her dog, Beau, Lynette Breton made one that goes with her kitchen. She laminated two layers of 1/2″ Baltic birch plywood for the substrate, then glued the same Wilsonart Boomerang laminate she used for her counters to the top and underside for stability, using a vacuum press with Titebond glue. The chrome tubing was left over from a custom towel rack commission; she made the station with three legs, adding white cane-tip protectors found at her local hardware store. The shape of the top was inspired by the boomerang pattern on the laminate. Margaret Stevens-Becksvoort
No dull edges. The MagBlok by Benchcrafted holds knives safely with a powerful magnet concealed behind wood. Unlike commercial magnetic holders, which have metal on their faces, the MagBlok won’t dull a sharp edge when hastily removed. Father John Abraham
Pull-out cutting board. True to her mid-century inspiration, Lynette Breton incorporated a pull-out cutting board in her cabinets. The board is made of maple with a breadboard front; curved edges overlap the cabinet face. Margaret Stevens-Becksvoort
Road food. Narayan Nayar, an avid cook and woodworker, wanted to equip his travel trailer’s galley with some nice cooking knives for an extended road trip. He wanted the knives to be readily accessible, in addition to well-protected. He designed this knife tray, which sits on runners at the top of a drawer, along the lines of the drawers in which he stores his lathe tools. Knives are separated by two holders — one that secures the handle and one the blade. The tray is bottomless to prevent the accumulation of detritus; this feature also keeps the contents below the tray visible. The tray is made from a leftover beech countertop sink cutout and holds the four knives he wanted to have for 100 days on the road: paring, boning/fillet, 7″ santoku and bread. Narayan Nayar
For two decades, Nancy made a living by turning limitations into creative, lively and livable kitchens for her clients. “Kitchen Think” is an invitation to learn from both her completed kitchen designs (plus kitchens from a few others) and from the way she worked in her Bloomington, Ind., workshop.
Unlike most kitchen design books, “Kitchen Think” is a woodworker’s guide to designing and furnishing the kitchen, from a down-to-the-studs renovation to refacing existing cabinets. And Nancy shows you how it can be done without spending a fortune or adding significantly to your local landfill.
(Yesterday this post was sent out to email subscribers with a draft introduction. If you received that yesterday and were confused, blame me. You can see the post in its correct entirety here. Below is the introduction to the piece you didn’t receive.)
During the last four years, I’ve lost four members of my immediate family (mom, dad, stepfather, sister), most of them suddenly and unexpectedly. And if I’ve learned one thing from the experience, it’s this: Tell people who are important to you how you feel about them. Today. Don’t wait for a nice evening on the back porch.
As many of you know, Nancy Hiller is battling pancreatic cancer. Her treatment has its ups and (deep) downs. And while I am counting on her to be one of the long-term survivors of this horrible disease, I also didn’t want her to ever leave this earth without know how important she has been to me as a person, woodworker, writer and supremely ethical being.
I’m not alone. Kara Gebhart Uhl spent the last couple weeks talking to some of the people in and out of Nancy’s orbit. And below is what they had to say.
If you’ve read her books, been a student in one of her classes or been a customer of hers, you know that this only scratches the surface of a most impressive and lovely person.
A family case. In the kitchen of Fritz Lieber and Donald Maxwell we used architectural butt hinges salvaged from Fritz’s grandparents’ house. In partnership with architectural knobs, which we used for doors and drawers, the over-sized hardware gives the design a vaguely Alice-in-Wonderland look. Spectrum Creative Group
If you had told me in 2007 that Lost Art Press was going to publish a book on kitchens, my 2007 self would have been skeptical. Kitchen books are usually put out by imprints that specialize in home and interior design. They require both a deep knowledge of the topic, plus a deep photographic well of example kitchens.
Plus these books encourage readers to be shamefully wasteful: Let’s rip out your five-year-old kitchen and put in a spectacular new one.
After talking to Nancy Hiller for a few minutes about her thoughts on a kitchen book, however, I was immediately sold. Nancy laid out a book that was in opposition to most kitchen design books on the market.
• She encourages you to explore clues in your house to create a kitchen that looks correct in your home’s historical context.
• She shows how you can work with existing floorplans, cabinets and materials to make your kitchen beautiful without sending hundreds of yards of waste to the landfill.
• And she provides professional and practical information on how you can do this work yourself.
“Kitchen Think” is the culmination of Hiller’s life as a professional furniture maker, cabinet maker and kitchen designer. It’s a sprawling, 369-page look at an important (and expensive) room in your house from a perspective that is rarely heard.
And readers have responded to Nancy’s voice. Though the book has been out since only June 2020, it has become one of our bestselling books of all time (see the list here).If you have been thinking about ripping out your entire kitchen, you might want to think again.
— Christopher Schwarz
The following is excerpted from “Kitchen Think,” by Nancy R. Hiller.
Hinges are more than a means of hanging doors. They contribute significantly to a kitchen’s look. In principle you can use any type of hinge for kitchen cabinet doors, but this section will focus on those that are most common.
Butt Hinges Doors on traditional kitchen cabinets were inset and typically hung on butt or butterfly hinges. Let’s start with the former. Butt hinges come in several varieties. There are extruded brass butts (known in Britain as solid drawn brass butts) with fixed pins and loose-pin butts that allow you to separate a door from its cabinet by simply removing the pin, leaving the hinge leaves in place. All traditional butt hinges are made to be mortised into the edge of the face frame (if there is one) and door, though in British cabinetry it is not uncommon to find them let only into the door; in these cases the cabinet leaf is simply screwed to the face frame stile.
Two kinds of butt hinge. An extruded butt with a fixed pin, right, and a butt hinge with loose pin, left.
Alternatively, you can use salvaged architectural hinges that were originally made for use with full-size house doors. Yes, they’re over-sized for most kitchen cabinets, but there are times when this kind of exaggerated scale packs a stylistic punch that no conventionally sized hardware can.
Easier going. Loose-pin butt hinges are easier to use, in many circumstances, because they allow you to remove a door without removing the entire hinge. One leaf stays on the door, the other on the cabinet, while you take the door to your bench (or outside, if you’re working on a jobsite) to plane off an extra 1/32″.
Another kind of butt is the adjustable, no-mortise hinge. This hinge is designed to resemble a traditional butt, with or without decorative finials, but is screwed to the surface of the door and face frame, the idea being that it is far quicker to install and requires fewer tools and lesser skill. The drawback, at least in my opinion, is that these hinges are a poor imitation of real butts; they look under-scaled. And to any craftsperson, they suggest an easy way out. That said, they do offer a relatively decent traditional butt hinge look and can make a set of cabinets significantly more affordable when the client or homeowner is on a tight budget.
Easy way out. Many cabinetmakers use adjustable surface-mounted butt hinges to save on labor.
Butterfly Hinges In the early 20th century, as companies turned out large numbers of cabinets, it became clear that inset doors came with their own built-in problems, the greatest being that they require a bit of skill to install well. On any cabinetry supplied with doors already hung – Hoosier cabinets are an ideal example – the tendency of doors to bind when cabinets were delivered to real-world locations became an even more pressing issue; the cabinets were sold with the claim that they were readily affordable and ready to use. So it was not surprising to me, as a cabinetmaker, to find in the course of my research on Hoosier cabinets that the largest manufacturer of these kitchen furnishings pretty quickly switched to half-inset (also known as half-overlay) doors. They marketed this as an improvement on the grounds that the resulting lip would keep dust from getting into the cabinet through the gaps in traditional inset doors.
Fill the gap. half-inset doors on a reproduction Hoosier cabinet.
Butterfly hinges have been used since the 19th century, if not before, and were widely used into the 1930s. Their popularity comes and goes with changes in decorating fashions. For a decade or so in the early 2000s there was a wide range of designs and finishes available, but ever since mid-century modern became the new “it girl” and gave “old-house” styles the boot, those of us who appreciate early 20th-century architecture have been reduced to choosing from a few reproduction designs offered by reputable manufacturers. One solution to this diminished variety is to look for antique hinges at salvage yards, antique shops and online.
Surface treatment. A fold-back hinge on a cabinet I made for our former kitchen, based loosely on details from Hoosier cabinets. The hinges came from Kennedy Hardware (kennedyhardware.com). Spectrum Creative Group
A variant on the older-pattern butterfly hinge is the offset butterfly hinge, designed for use with half-inset doors. And there are other variants on this one, some Art Deco-inspired, others the fold-back hinges used on certain Hoosier-type cabinets.
Deco detail. These streamline-style hinges are a Deco-era classic, though historically they were most often plated with chrome. Photo courtesy of House of Antique Hardware
3/8″ Inset Hinges From the mid- through late-20th century another type of hinge was widely used for kitchen doors. The “3/8″ inset” hinge came (and is still available) in a few patterns, the most distinctive being a sort-of bullet/streamline design. This type of hinge is available in free- or self-closing forms. It is extremely simple to install, with one caveat: You must allow enough space in the rabbet around the door’s perimeter to account for the distance by which the hinge will push the hinge stile away from the face frame. The only circumstances in which I would recommend using these hinges today are when replacing a broken hinge or adding new doors to an existing kitchen full of cabinets hung on them or, of course, if you are recreating a period-authentic kitchen in movie set or a house that originally had them.
Cabinets for everyman. Many mass-produced kitchen cabinets in the 1940s and ’50s had doors on half-inset hinges such as this one, still produced today.
European Hinges European hinges were designed for use with European-style cabinets, also known as frameless cabinets. Underlying this system of cabinet building and installation is a desire to maximize efficiency by standardizing components based on 32mm (approximately 1-3/8″) increments.
European hinges come in a vast variety, each designed to work in a different application. Even so, most consist of just two basic parts – a hinge and a mounting plate.
A no-show hinge. To keep his cabinets as clean-lined as possible, Bruce Chaffin used hidden European hinges. The doors open and close by means of touch latches.
To make a simple matter slightly less so, European hinges also come in a variety specifically designed for use on cabinets with face frames; these have an integral mounting plate. But you don’t have to use this “face frame” hinge to use European hinges on cabinets with face frames; you can just as well use the two-part variety, provided that you choose the correct combination of hinge and mounting plate for your application.
Depending on which combination of hinge and mounting plate you use, these hinges can work with doors that are inset, half-inset or full overlay. And there are even more variations! A full-overlay door may overlay the cabinet face by 1/4″ or 1-1/4″, depending on the mounting plate you use. Doors can open 95° or as much as 165°. They can be free closing (these do not hold themselves closed but require a catch) or self-closing. Some are even available with a soft-close feature that shuts the door for you once you give it a gentle push. (Aside from their undeniable coolness, these are useful for keeping children from slamming their fingers in cabinets.)
Just the ticket. Lynette Breton found the best solution for her full-overlay doors is the XXI surface mount concealed hinge .
Despite the huge variety, all of these hinges have the same pattern for drilling the hinge cup mortise in the door: a hole drilled to the depth of the cup (about 1/2″) with a 35mm Forstner bit. There are two good reasons to choose European hinges in select applications. First, being invisible when a door is closed, they offer a clean look. If not seeing the hinges is important to your design, these may be your guys. Second, they offer adjustability in three planes, which makes fitting any kind of door – inset, half-inset or full overlay – ridiculously simple compared to using traditional butt hinges.
Specialty Hinges If knife hinges are your thing, there’s no reason why you can’t use those or any other type of hinge less commonly used for kitchen cabinets. In some applications where none of the conventional options will work, you just have to go looking for a special hinge.
Every year, your spouse and friends ask us which books they should buy for you during the holidays. And if they aren’t sure which book you want, they ask us: “Well, which books are your best-sellers?”
Until today, I had only a gut feeling about it, but I’d never really looked at the statistics. After some ciphering, I came up with a list that had a few surprises.
10. Doormaking and Window Making by Anonymous. This was a shock. This small book is a reprint of two historical texts brought to our attention by joiner Richard Arnold. It found an audience among people who restore old buildings.
9. Campaign Furniture by Christopher Schwarz. This book is one of the few in print on this style of furniture, which my grandparents collected for many years. I’ve been told by readers that it is a nice text on classical casework.
8. Kitchen Think by Nancy Hiller. I was a little surprised by this one because it was released in the summer of 2020. It’s a fantastic book, as is everything Nancy writes. If you are interested in how to design (and build) a kitchen that is in context for your house, this is the book.
7. By Hand & Eye by Jim Tolpin and George Walker. This one is no surprise. Ever since this book was released, it has continually found new audiences who are interested in designing good-looking furniture using whole-number ratios.
6. The Anarchist’s Workbench by Christopher Schwarz. On the one hand, I am not surprised to see this book on the list. It is, after all, about workbenches (the birdhouses of the intermediate woodworker clan). But on the other hand, the book is free as a pdf. Free.
5. The Woodworker’s Pocket Book edited by Charles Hayward. I love this little book. I knew it would be a home run among woodworkers, and I was (for once) correct.
4. With the Grain by Christian Becksvoort. This book is immensely popular because it is incredibly practical and avoids the heavy science stuff, but it still tells you exactly what you need to know to use solid wood in furniture effectively.
3. The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing. This book is a classic and should be on the shelves of every woodworker who is curious about hand-tool woodworking. We fought hard to bring it back into print, and readers have been thrilled as well.
2. The Anarchist’s Design Book by Christopher Schwarz. I am so happy to see this book on this list. This book took so many years to write and get just right. I feel like it’s the right combination of practical construction advice and a screed about poorly made and overly ornate furniture.
1. The Anarchist’s Tool Chest by Christopher Schwarz. This book helped us get this company on its feet and the capital to publish the works of other authors. Even after 10 years, this book still sells and sells – thanks to word of mouth.
On a last note, please remember that we are a small publisher (we recently graduated to “small publisher,” up from “microscopic publisher”). So none of these books would make a blip on the screens of a corporate publisher. And our annual revenue could easily be found between the couch cushions of the CEO of Penguin/Random House.
Maybe someday we’ll hit the Medium Time – with a book on birdhouses.
To everyone who contributed to the fundraiser Megan Fitzpatrick organized on my behalf last winter, sent kind comments, notes of support or handmade gifts, shared garden bounty, good wishes and prayers: Thank you.
After several months I thought it time to express my gratitude with an update. I still have Stage IV pancreatic cancer, per the original diagnosis. But if I hadn’t seen the scan images and read my doctors’ reports, I wouldn’t know it.
Six months of Folfirinox chemotherapy – not something I can recommend if you’re looking for a good time – shrank the primary tumor by two-thirds. Six weeks off chemo, starting at the end of June, gave me a chance to recover strength, energy (and my sense of taste, which was super-bleh due to Folfirinox). I started the alternate chemo regimen, Gemcitabine and Abraxane, in August and have had no side effects to speak of so far.
Most important, I feel better than I have in years. My diet is seriously wholesome, I haven’t been drinking alcohol, I exercise every day and am working with some excellent integrative healthcare practitioners.
The kitchen I’ve been working on sporadically for a few months. My part (the cabinets and plate rack to the right of the sink) is done. My clients, Nick Detrich and Kathleen Benson, have done much of the site work themselves, including the little recessed shelves at the right, which just need trim.
Throughout most of this period I have continued to work. I started by writing “Shop Tails,” which is forthcoming from Lost Art Press, then built and installed the cabinetry for the kitchen of a 1920 bungalow (above). I’ve been blogging as usual for the Pros’ Corner at Fine Woodworking and the Little Acorns series of profiles here. Thanks to the success of “Kitchen Think,” I have also had a number of kitchen design commissions, among them a few rivals for Most Challenging Kitchen Layout of My Career. I do love a challenge. This week I will start prepping for a shoot with Anissa Kapsales of the plate rack article we’ve had under contract for longer than I can even remember, between the pandemic and various chemo-related delays on my end. I’m also working on some Voysey two-heart chairs.
I am feeling strong and optimistic. Please don’t ask about medical specifics – not because I am trying to keep any of this a secret (I’m not), but because I honestly feel so great that I’m done with seeing myself as a cancer patient. I am a healthy woodworker, design professional and writer who is living with cancer. Seeing myself this way does not equate to denial. There is no denial going on here. To the contrary, this has been and continues to be a transformative experience, and I wouldn’t want to deny any of it because it has taught me so much. If you’re interested in hearing more, there’s plenty in the first two chapters of “Shop Tails,” as well as in the conclusion.
The outpouring of love and generosity from Lost Art Press readers and editors has been one of the most moving experiences of my life. You have kept me company, shared cancer-related resources and made me laugh, in addition to providing invaluable help with medical expenses, which are significant even for those self-employed people who pay through the nose for the most affordable healthcare coverage. The best way I can show my gratitude is by continuing my efforts to recover from this disease that is widely considered incurable. So that’s what I’m doing.
