Give your kitchen island a makeover

For most of us, the kitchen is the heart of the home, and some of our best memories are made when it’s filled with family and friends. If you have an island in your kitchen, chances are this is the hub around which all the love and laughter is shared.

Since your kitchen island is such an important place in your home — and in your life — make it beautiful. Here are some quick and easy looks to inspire you.

The key to styling a show-stealing kitchen-island display is to match the scale of your arrangement with the size of your kitchen and the island. For example, many newer homes have large kitchens with islands that are so expansive, you could almost call them continents. To keep a display from being swallowed up on a bigger island, it needs to carry some visual weight. But the same display on my tiny kitchen island would be overpowering. Scale is everything!

Once you know what size your display should be, select one larger-scale accent piece to serve as the base. Then, weave in additional elements, such as seasonal decor, to create the lovely layers that make the finished tableau intriguing.

I am crazy about two-tiered French dessert servers. Truth be told, I decided to add an island to my kitchen just so I would have a spot to display a dessert server in my home. Tall and narrow, a dessert server is the perfect pick for my little kitchen because it doesn’t take up much counter space yet gives me lots of shelves to dress it up with accents. And, the glass shelves make it less visually overpowering.

A dessert server makes a perfect backdrop for drink and snack stations on the island. The shelves can be lined with brightly colored boxes that could be filled with snacks. You could easily substitute them for bowls of condiments for your burger bar or ice-cream toppings for an ice-cream-sundae bar.

Concrete statuary, with its aged patina, interesting lines and strong visual weight, is an excellent option for your kitchen island, no matter what size the island is.

Black iron urns aren’t just for the garden. They are also fabulous on kitchen islands. I love working with urns because you can change them in a snap, reinventing their look for special events or to reflect the season. For instance, for fall, simply place a fat pumpkin on top of an urn and you’re kitchen-island display is done! For the holidays, fill it with tree ornaments or large pine cones painted silver and gold.

One of the secrets to making fresh-fruit displays look so professional is to place a layer of moss between the top of the urn and the fruit. You could also use Spanish moss, letting a few tendrils trail down.

Aren’t wooden dough bowls amazing? We still can’t get enough of these big beauties at Nell Hill’s because you can reinvent them again and again, making them one of the best investment pieces you’ll find. Wooden dough bowls are particularly perfect for kitchen-island displays because they are long and thin, giving you lots of visual weight without eating up precious counter space.

For one unusual kitchen-island display, we filled a dough bowl with brightly colored pottery. The reason this display works is we’ve mixed together a variety of sizes and shapes, but kept our color palette harmonious, centering around the warm hues of gold and orange. For added texture, we tucked in a few rolled-up pages from old books and magazines. I’m hot on this look right now, and we’re doing it in displays all over the stores.

Another great way to style your wooden dough bowl is to fill it with a line of potted ferns, a mess of ceramic balls, an arrangement of chunky candlesticks or seasonal items like gourds or pine cones.

ŸMary Carol Garrity has a blog at nellhills.com. She can be reached at marycarol@nellhills.com.