How I Organize Serving Platters and Bowls in My Kitchen with Very Limited Storage Space

published Sep 26, 2022
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Credit: Lana Kenney

I absolutely love serving bowls and platters, but I didn’t have an organized way to display them. Because my boyfriend and I stay home most weekends, we like to plate out dinners on fun serveware to zhuzh up the presentation, making the meal a little more exciting. It’s a great habit, but it threw a wrench into my kitchen organizational system for the longest time. 

My one-bedroom city apartment has a frustratingly small amount of storage, and my kitchen comes with only one top cabinet. This meant that I had to supplement the kitchen with an island, a few IKEA cupboards, and a vintage cabinet to make room for all the pots, pans, and appliances a kitchen needs, leaving very little room for fun extravagances, like floral serving platters. 

For the longest time, I stacked all of the various serving plates and bowls on top of each other on the bottom shelf of my kitchen island, but this deterred us from using them because it was a pain to get something from the bottom of the stack. You had to carefully remove everything from the cabinet to get to that bottom plate. I wanted an easier way to display everything, but I didn’t exactly have room to play with options. 

That is, until an idea struck me. It came to me when I saw cutting boards organized on their sides on pan organizers on Pinterest. I wondered if the same could be done with the platters. I knew the trick was to choose a heavier organizer that could take the weight of porcelain and glass, and one with wide spaces between racks so differently shaped platters could fit in between. 

Credit: Marlen Komar

You could also choose one with adjustable racks so you could move them according to the platter’s thickness, but in the end, I decided on the Simple Houseware Rack Organizer, which comes in a two-pack. It costs under $20, has three compartments per rack, and was built specifically to hold lids, baking sheets, and cutting boards. It is made from sheet metal and has some heft to it, ensuring it won’t tip over if I take a few plates at once. 

While I bought this specifically for my idea, you can recreate it with a spare pan and pot holder you’re not using — just flip it on its side! I put both racks on the bottom of my cabinet and lined up my platters vertically on the shelf. 

The end result is pure organizational bliss. I can see my options clearly, and it’s so much easier to choose my plates this way — no more lifting five platters to get to the one on the bottom!