Crate and Barrel plate holder hacked
photo: sally schneider

Over the years we’ve been given a number of beautiful oversized platters which we love to use for celebrations of all sorts. We’ve discovered they are too oddly-shaped to fit stacked on a shelf in our renovated kitchen cabinets, but would if we could find a way to stand them up. Using wire plate display stands for each platter would prove unwieldy and take up too much room. So we started to look around for another option.

We found it in the form of an inexpensive plate holder from Crate and Barrel: basically two wooden bars held in place by dowels, with dowels placed vertically at about 1″ intervals to hold plates: a tinker-toy of a plate holder.

Our platters need bigger spacing to balance upright properly so we decided to try hacking the plate holder by removing some of the upright dowels.

photo: sally schneider

…We used an adjustable plyers to twist some out of their holes…

photo: sally schneider

…Then we tested the new spacing we’d made to see if our platters would balance well, with no danger of tipping.

photo: sally schneider

It works like a charm. We can remove and replace the dowels at will, configuring the holder to suit our needs (while being able to reconfigure them down the line, if need be).

photo: sally schneider

The plate holders come in 9.5-inch and 15-inch lengths. The smaller ones made best use of our 11 3/4″ interior cabinet depth, since the back platter needs room to tilt back a bit.

We’re going to buy another pair to store odd kitchen items: pot lids, wire racks, food processor blades – and make the most of the limited space we have.

Related posts: a guide to “found” and treasured dishes
rethinking a dish rack
pascal anson on (cheap) kitchen cabinets
swell rigged kitchen island on sawhorses
alt plastic food bag solutions: re-usable cloth, mesh, or freeform…?

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6 replies on “wooden plate holder hack (for big platters, lids, racks etc)

  1. Very nice! I like the idea of being able to move the pegs around. I can picture another one, in a bigger space, working for cookie sheets, jelly roll pans, etc.

  2. Yes, cookie sheets–brilliant!

  3. Thanks so much. That is a really good idea for the right storage situation. With my front-to-back line-up, I’m thinking it would be tricky to access the platters. And for my rolling shelves, I need something that doesn’t need a top fixed shelf for support. That being said, spring-loaded rods offer a variety of great storage possibilities. We’ll be posting a new iteration we came up with recently soon.

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