Kitchens and garages don't appear to have all that much in common (one is a place to prepare food and entertain guests – the other is for practicing DIY and fixing our cars, after all). However, Giada De Laurentiis just bridged an unlikely gap between the two spaces, and we're left wondering why no one ever thought of doing so before.
The celebrated chef and Giada at Home star broke pantry conventions by taking this storage solution outside her kitchen (and the surrounding rooms) to her garage – and, though it's an unlikely setting, it's qualified as one of her favorite spots in her house.
'I realized I’ve never shown you one of my fav corners of my house, my personal Giadzy pantry,' De Laurentiis says. Giadzy, her Italian lifestyle brand, comprises everything from online recipes to travel tips and authentic food goods – the latter of which fills the shelves of her garage pantry.
'I’ve got a birthday party that I’m going to tonight, and one of my favorite things to do is to kind of create my own box from my own personal Giadzy stash in my garage. I love an organized pantry,' she comments. So, what does a figure like De Laurentiis keep in her pantry?
'Down here, I’ve got cookbooks, and then I’ll pick an array of pasta. [We have] super longs, we’ve got the shorter ones. [Also] my olive oil, which I find is so glamorous,' she comments. The Italian-themed shelves are similarly neatly stocked with tomatoes, ceramics, olives, flours, cookies, jams, candies, and chocolate.
In creating a pantry in her garage, De Laurentiis has reminded us to use all space around our property cleverly. Even if our garage is outside or not attached to our main home, it shouldn't stop us from considering it as a place to store goods (and when they're as beautiful and tasty as those in De Laurentiis's pantry, it's only inevitable that we'd want to bulk buy).
Alongside thinking outside the box in terms of space, kitchen designer Tom Howley recommends considering the height of our spaces, too.
‘Utilising the full height of the room and the depth of the cabinets means every inch serves a purpose. We also use smart hinges to allow the doors to be opened to 180 degrees to allow maximum reach and light, which is great for dark corners,’ he explains.
We can also make the most of our pantry space by arranging our shelves in a regimented way. Here are the essentials we swear by, no matter where our pantry is found.
