A PRIMER FOR THE WHOLESOME, HAPPY HOME

Kitchen Porn for the Cozy

(This piece previously appeared in the New York Times in 2011.) 

WALKING down a residential street in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., several years ago, I was stopped in my tracks by the beauty of a backyard clothesline hung with well-made, well-loved cotton things: embroidered pillowcases, hand-sewn aprons, cloth napkins and unstained tablecloths, secured on a white rope with wooden clothespins, waving before a wall of pine trees. It actually brought tears to my eyes; it was like stumbling on a time capsule full of lost femininity  all that stuff that was abandoned in the 1970s for being too contaminated by patriarchal social engineering. But there was something so careful, patient, constructive and good about that beautiful laundry. It was a genuine example of homemaking as a verb  a creative act that reifies the idea of “home.”

South Sixth Street in Williamsburg was, until a relatively recent influx of condominiums, part of a hazy gray area of a neighborhood, identifiable mainly by the Peter Luger Steakhouse and the nearby Hasidic community. Lately, enough small boutiques and restaurants have popped up for the area to have an earnest, artsy character.

Brook Farm General Store is a modest space invested with eclectic objects that collectively describe a truly personal vision  essentially an art installation that functions as a retail environment. Walking into the store, you become immersed in the intended mood with a whiff of cedar incense cones and the bouncy swing of the early Billie Holiday catalog.

Both the shiny-eyed brunette behind the counter (central casting for a silent-movie heroine rescued by Mounties) and the store lighting (much of it from handmade lamps with bone china shades, $195) are warm and easy on the eyes. Over all, the first impression is a feeling similar to being tucked lovingly into a soft-boiled egg.

The mandate for choosing the items for sale seems to be that everything must be as fetching as it is functional. The inventory collectively amounts to the ingredients of an ideally wholesome, happy home  tools for a set of forgotten skills, tastes and virtues I casually refer to as “the household arts”  a medium that includes warm sheets stacked on ironing boards, pies cooling on windowsills, Mason jars full of last summer’s gooseberries, and cans of Old Dutch Cleanser under the sink.

Near the back door, which looks out to a little frozen garden (which, I was assured, will be even lovelier in the spring), there is a wall of kitchen instruments ranging from the actually vintage to handsome items that have been made the same way for 100 years. A cast-iron frying pan can be had for $89. Glass turkey basters with black rubber squeeze balls are $7. A basket of blue and white porcelain measuring spoons ($15) sits above a perfectly ironed stack of linen tea towels. There are wood cutting boards, wood dishwashing brushes, tea balls, metal potato peelers, wooden citrus reamers  everything set so prettily that one can practically smell the sunlit yellow linoleum.

When I leaned over to inspect a low shelf of Taschen cookbooks, the proprietary animal, a small beagle named Nutmeg, waddled over, sat on my foot and gazed at me.

A glass jewelry case is full of odd antiques and curios: a collection of old golden lockets, an ivory Sherlock Holmes pipe in a leather and velvet case ($185), a shiny vintage English police whistle ($75).

There is a nicely curated corner devoted to paper goods: sturdy notebooks by Postalco, in mustard, navy and battleship-aqua ($14), and satisfyingly dense boxes of cream-laid Crown Mill stationery ($39), which make a shopper nostalgic for the lost art of written correspondence.

There is an excellent selection of blue-collar lunch-break items  goods once carried by 1950s building site supervisors with crew cuts and pocket protectors. There are Sigg metal lunchboxes, not unlike oversize anchovy tins ($29), and classic green Stanley thermoses ($30) that are a throwback to someone’s dad’s clean garage. I had never seen a Stanley flask ($20) before, but I reckoned that many a factory worker pocketed them in their coveralls until too many industrial accidents happened.

The hardware section, I thought, could stand to be a little harder (but then, I’m a girl who likes power tools). It’s charming, if a bit twee: a small selection of gardening implements, steel dustpans and a multi-head screwdriver kit packaged in cardboard with cute fonts and friendly explanatory language, possibly for timid young ladies who might otherwise wilt from anxiety trying to determine the difference between the hex and Phillips heads.

I was on the hunt for a gift and gravitated first to an old wooden block and tackle. I selected some cedar incense and a stainless steel bendy-straw, and finally abandoned the pulley for a vintage sterling silver faux-military dog tag to engrave ($125). The dog tag was somewhat tarnished, so the silent-movie star (Philippa Content, who owns the shop with her boyfriend, Christopher Winterbourne) polished it with a chamois.

The Brook Farm ethos walks a fine line: it’s a sincere, unisex, home-ec utilitarian wholesomeness that manages to create grandma magic without going overboard into doilies or other frippery. Like aspirin, peroxide and witch hazel, Grandma magic is tried and true: comfort, clean laundry and pie are home remedies that are still among the best, oldest, most sensible antidotes to the stresses of a brutal world.

CintraW@gmail.com

Artwork: “Produce,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2021