The cult of the extortionate ‘English’ kitchen

A house around the corner is on its fourth kitchen in a decade. Every two or three years, the house changes hands, the pristine kitchen comes out and a newer, pristiner kitchen goes in. They are always white, they are always shiny, and when I peer through the basement windows there is nothing in the way of signs of life. I reckon I can predict the next kitchen.

Think homespun, think rustic, think scullery maid in mobcap and pinny. What the rich want now is a plain old Plain English kitchen. Hand-crafted cabinets, antiqued brass, Delft tiles with authentic craquelure. Starting at £34,000 and going up to… well, how much have you got?

Don’t you dare put Dulux on your artisan doors. Plain English has its own bespoke paint chart. Farrow & Ball’s colours – ‘String’, ‘Brassica’, ‘Dead Salmon’, ‘Mole’s Breath’ – have long amused the paint-swatching classes, but Plain English’s colours take the oaten biscuit. They are so very ’umble. Try ‘Starched Apron’, ‘Coal Scuttle’, ‘Dripping Tap’, ‘Boiled Dishcloth’, ‘Mushy Peas’ and ‘Milky Tea’. Just the thing for your Belgravia townhouse. Nicely set off by the holy kitchen trinity: Aga, larder, Carrara marble. And a frilly skirt around the butler’s sink.

Plain English, founded 30 years ago in Suffolk, opened a showroom in Greenwich Village last year, prompting the New York Times to hail the arrival of a ‘new trophy kitchen’ – it looks like an old one – and the romance of the larder. ‘Pantry porn’ is big on Instagram. The paper puts it down to the Downton effect.

There’s a touch of Marie Antoinette about ladies in the Hamptons playing at upstairs-downstairs. Shaker simplicity at The Last Tycoon prices. Vast, but unvarnished, with glass-panelled screens to separate kitchen from flower room, flower room from boot room, boot room from larder, and larder from pantry.