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The kitchen is where we spend most of our time. It’s the room for cooking, baking, cleaning, meal-prepping, eating, catching up with friends and family, and it may even double as your office. You want such an important space to feel personalized with your style and pleasant touches, but decorating your kitchen can be challenging. Creating clutter is one of the worst, most common kitchen-organization mistakes, and it can make your chores even more stressful. And if you display decor for decor’s sake, you can almost count on those items getting damaged from heat, moisture, and rogue ingredients. The secret solution is to find kitchen items with actual uses that can double as decor. The perfect place to start, according to interior decor expert Joanna Gaines, is with bread boards.
“One of my favorite pieces to keep out on the countertops are bread boards,” Gaines says in a video for Target. “They’re beautiful for serving food. You can also turn them on their sides and lean them against the backsplash to add texture and dimension without taking too much countertop space.” You need bread boards, anyway; why not turn them into pops of warm color when they’re not in use? Choose a few in different shapes, sizes, or tones of wood and group them in another Gaines-approved method of creating vignettes. They’ll enrich your kitchen, will stay out of the way, can spring into action and serve breads, cheeses, and more, and they’re easy to keep clean.
How to decorate with bread boards and apply the approach elsewhere
To create your own breadboard decor, especially in terms of vignettes, sets are helpful. This $54 set of bamboo boards on Amazon is an instant vignette thanks to its three staggered sizes. Or you can mix and match: A rounded rectangular Acacia wood board contributes a beautiful blend of light-to-medium brown shades to any kitchen; a long, narrow maple wood board adds an element of interest with its shape; and a board spliced with marble is a modern touch that could play up quartz, granite, or marble countertops. There are also decorative bread and cutting boards for more specific motifs, like this mango wood tray with antique-inspired carved edges, this chic board with a checkered pattern of light and dark wood, and this round board available in various floral patterns. Place two to three varying boards together in a vignette and accent them with a plant or other kitchen item doubling as decor. Ina Garten’s kitchen-organization hack, which she shared with the NYT Cooking, is dividing tools between two crocks, both of which you can choose in pretty hues and patterns.
It’s a popular approach to choose stylish kitchen-counter items that also serve a purpose — because they’ll pretty up the room without creating excess clutter or getting in the way. They’re also, naturally, made to be in the kitchen, so they’re durable. Beyond bread boards, think ceramic and glass canisters for food storage, patterned mugs or glassware, decorative bowls, and hanging fruit baskets.
