Provence Furniture for a Traditional Country Kitchen
Provence furniture is a simple, yet elegant, type of furniture that offers longevity and durability in addition to style and charm. Learn about a few pieces of this furniture that can adorn the traditional country kitchen and make a difference.
The balmy Mediterranean climate of the Provence area, with its hot, dry summers and temperate winters, abundant sunshine and fresh air require very little assistance to make you comfortable within your home. Rooms are generally large and spacious and the typical Provence furniture is unpretentious and understated. The charming ambience of traditional kitchens in Provence homes have been much celebrated in the works of famous expatriates, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham, to name a couple, who adopted the beautiful southeast of France as their preferred abodes.
An archetypal Provence kitchen has a casual, rustic air and the Provence furniture is never lavish or adorned. The kitchen is the place where, of course, delicious meals are prepared with abandon but also doubles as the center of social activity for family and friends. A dining room is practically unheard of, except in larger mansions and chateaus, so your dining table with its accompanying benches or chairs could also be accommodated in the large kitchen.
In time honored fashion, you could lay flagstones or hexagonal terracotta tiles in warm reds or browns for your kitchen flooring to bring in the essence of a Provence kitchen as well as to facilitate frequent cleaning. You could embellish the flooring with multicolored cement tiles running along the four sides to form a typically colorful boarder. Consider a rectangular ‘carpet’ of these pattered ‘encaustics’ in the center of the kitchen too, to form a colorful island for your dining table and chairs. The ceiling of the kitchen could be in simple white stucco or you might prefer rustic wooden rafters running across it. Wall cabinets are not customary aspects of Provence furniture and you could instead hang your pots, pans and ladles from hooks on the walls or suspend them from the ceiling rafters over a large work island, adding to the casual, country look.
The hob, or traditionally the range, could be housed in a brick platform surfaced with bright coloured tiles. Behind the hob, create an easy to clean tiled splash-back in matching or contrast colours. Below the work top, you could build in simple brick-walled niches, plastered and painted grey, blue or ‘shabby’ white. Add doors to some of these niches if you like, but cover the others with gathered curtains hanging from the countertop. In keeping with tradition, choose rough cotton curtains in characteristic blues, greens and oranges with bright floral motifs. Your kitchen windows could be dressed in similar curtains to provide the unmistakable stamp of a French country kitchen. A couple of walnut wood armoires in natural finish would complete the storage aspects of your kitchen, as far as Provence furniture goes.
Invest in a large oak wood dining table, painted or left in rustically natural tones, and stand it in the center of the carpet of encaustics. Then place two long wooden benches at opposite ends and perhaps wooden stools with straw seats along the other two sides. Every piece of Provence furniture in the room would bear a heritage look about it to provide you with a very authentic looking country kitchen.
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