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Liken it to a storied artwork or sculpture: Dishware is developing a renewed kind of cultural cachet as design aficionados are decorating with plates on the wall. Style icons including Moda Operandi cofounder Lauren Santo Domingo, textile maven Carolina Irving, and fashion journalist turned Milanese print purveyor J.J. Martin are full-on obsessed with their dishes, it seems. Instagram feeds across the decorosphere are filled with tablescapes and place settings, and the market category has seen newcomers such as Social Studies offering fanciful dishware for rent. Suddenly, china is no longer something registered for before a wedding or reluctantly inherited from Granny—it has become an extension of an outfit, part of one’s personal style.
But what to do with all those plates when cabinet space begins to run low? Tabletop-loving tastemakers have always known the answer: Take those dishes out of the cabinets and display them on the walls, of course!
“I hate the idea of beautiful plates [being languorously] unused or unseen in a cupboard,” says stylist, editor, and self-professed tableware maniac Mieke ten Have, who fancies decorating with plates on the wall and within bookshelves in nearly every room of her barn in upstate New York. “A plate is a perfect little canvas and a harmonious shape.”
Ten Have recommends grouping them by color or collection type. She hung a vestibule with blues: 18th-century Delft chargers and platters, French blue and white faïence, and pale blue English transferware. Elsewhere, she mounted a collection of rare Creil et Montereau faux-bois puce cameau plates all together on shelves. “I love the dimension and texture it adds to a wall,” she says. “And there’s something wonderfully harmonious about a collection of circles.”
Designer Anouska Hempel took a similar—and meticulously hung—approach in an historic manor in the English countryside. Within the breakfast room, a collection of near-identical porcelain plates is displayed over the Georgian mantle. The set is one of many antique collections arranged within the storied interior.
Milan-based printoholic J.J. Martin, whose cult line of patterned dresses evolved into tableware in 2017, took a rather opposite approach in the kitchen of her Milan flat. “l wanted it to look as if they were literally thrown on the wall and stuck there,” she says of the brilliantly clashing display she created with castoffs and color trials saved from when she was developing her La Double J tableware line. (In reality, she laid everything out on the floor first to find a grouping that worked and hired her handyman to help with installation.)
“For those of us who don’t have unlimited budgets or unlimited art collections, it’s fun to get creative with how you decorate the walls,” says Martin, who’s known for her signature pattern punch. “This stuff is meant to be enjoyed, ogled, and eaten visually.”
Naturally, the home’s culinary hubs (kitchen, dining room, breakfast nook) are an intuitive landing place for hanging plates on the wall. Take AD100 talent Giancarlo Valle’s color-drenched dining room within a client’s Manhattan townhouse, where he covers the dining room hearth with plates by Stephen Bird. The varying patterns provide plenty of visual intrigue, but the blue and green palette brings some consistency to the budding collection.
In his own kitchen in Sussex, AD100 designer Martin Brudnizki complements the culinary space with a column of printed plates (previously owned by decorating doyenne Nancy Lancaster) lining a bare wall. Not only do the dishes pair nicely with the room’s food-focused objective, but they also integrate the marigold and Kelly green color palette that Brudnizki uses to coat the kitchen walls and cabinets, respectively.
Though this alternative wall decor feels fresh, hanging plates on the wall is nothing new. In 1972, The New York Times declared in a headline “Decorative Plates—Not Fine Art, But They’re Good As Gold,” covering the fad of collectible dishware by the likes of Norman Rockwell, Charles Schulz, Salvador Dalí, and Andrew Wyeth. (Companies like Prospect NY and Artware Editions carry that torch today with their artist-designed dishware.)
But even so, dish delirium stretches back long before that. “In many European castles, special rooms were created to display porcelain and ceramic dishes,” points out Carolina Irving, who hung her Iznik plates—too delicate for everyday use—in a row to create a cornice of sorts in her Portugal kitchen. AD100 designer Frank de Biasi did something similar in his own Tangier dining room.
“We had a space just under the crown which was crying out for adornment,” de Biasi recalls. “So we painted a band of bright green and hung the plates on that. It created a bit of architecture around the room and made for some fetching eye candy.” As for the other, lower-hanging plates around the house, he and husband Gene Meyer regularly grab them straight from the wall when entertaining.
Fortunately, the burgeoning wall plate trend can look divine even without a designated display room. When treated as though a framed photo or conversation-starting artwork, plates can be a suitable addition to any room with bare walls. In the dining room of a 17th-century château in France’s Loire Valley, designer Tino Zervudachi filled an alcove with Iznik plates that were collected by the homeowner’s grandmother. When paired with a snug banquette, the plate-adorned alcove becomes a laid-back, cozy alternative to the room’s more formal dining area.
The concept doesn’t stop at plates: Any eye-catching tableware works wonders on a wall. Take, for example, when Mandy Cheng spotted a small stack of unused baskets in a room of actress Emmy Raver-Lampman and actor Daveed Diggs’s Los Angeles home. “I was immediately drawn to the colors and textures and held one up to the wall,” recalls Cheng, who fastened the woven bowls to the walls with small brass finish nails so they can be easily moved around. “Emmy’s eyes absolutely lit up.”