The English country kitchen, with Egyptian ceramics
The English kitchen has been quietly absorbing foreign pottery for three hundred years, and has never once looked as though it were trying to.
Delft arrived from the Low Countries. Blue and white came by way of the East India ships, was copied at Worcester and Caughley, and ended up on every dresser in the country. Faience came back from Provence in the boot of a car; majolica came back from Italy with the honeymooners; a Portuguese cabbage-leaf tureen turns up in kitchens that have never been to Portugal. None of it was made for a painted dresser in Dorset. All of it looks entirely at home on one now.
Fayoum pottery joins that line without difficulty, and for the same three reasons: it is painted by hand, it is earth-coloured, and it was made to be used rather than admired.
Begin at the dresser
The dresser is where an English kitchen keeps its evidence — the mismatched cups, the plate somebody brought back, the jug that has outlasted the marriage. It is a forgiving place to start, because nothing on a dresser has ever been expected to match, and the good ones look less designed than accumulated.
Put one Egyptian piece on a shelf you already like. A jug is the easiest opening move, since it earns its place by holding something — wooden spoons, cut herbs, one stem of whatever is out in the garden — and its cobalt reads simply as blue and white, which the shelf already understands.
Resist grouping them. A row of Egyptian pieces announces itself as a collection, and a collection reads as decoration; two or three spaced along different shelves among the English china read as a household. This is the difference between a room that has been decorated and a room that has been lived in, and it is almost entirely a matter of spacing.
Breakfast is the honest test
A mug is handled more often than any other object in a kitchen, which makes it the piece that tells you whether you actually like something or merely approve of it.
The Fayoum mugs are thick-walled and a little heavy, and the glaze is soft enough to take a faint patina over a year or two of use. They hold heat well. The painted leaf runs under the handle, where the potter's thumb went — the sort of detail one notices on the fortieth morning rather than the first, which is the only kind of detail worth paying for.
Keep two in daily rotation rather than shutting a set of six in a cupboard for visitors. This is pottery that improves with handling, and nothing in a cupboard improves at all.
Mixing, without arriving at a theme
The rule that holds: let the Egyptian pieces carry the pattern and let the English pieces carry the plain. A hand-painted dinner plate beneath a plain white bowl is right. A hand-painted plate beneath a floral bowl is a competition, and both lose.
Keep to one temperature of colour across the table. Fayoum ware runs warm by default — the greens carry yellow in them, the blues carry grey, and the terracotta body shows through at the foot where the glaze thins — so it sits happily with cream, oatmeal linen, old wood, pewter and brass, and very badly with anything cold, bright or grey. This is the same instinct that makes Robert Kime's rooms work: everything at one temperature, pattern earning its place rather than announcing it.
And use the small bowls constantly. Salt, olives, a cut lemon, the rings off your fingers by the sink, one egg. A small painted bowl in daily circulation does more for the character of a kitchen than any larger piece kept on display, because character is cumulative and comes from use.
What it ought to feel like
Not Egyptian. Not, particularly, English either. Simply a kitchen belonging to people who have been somewhere and kept a few things, because the things were good rather than because they matched.
That is the whole ambition and it is a modest one. A house furnished entirely from a single place is a stage set, whichever place it is. A house furnished from several, slowly, over years, is somewhere to live.
