A few years ago, my husband and I began looking for a china cabinet. We needed something with big glass doors that would protect its contents and harmonize with our existing furniture, that wasn’t a 1930s reproduction of a piece of Rococo case furniture, wasn’t something we would have to assemble ourselves, and wouldn’t cost as much as a new car. We’d been meaning to do this for years, and it was only when it became clear that our ceramics collection was on a high-stakes collision course with our cats that we got really serious about it.
It’s difficult to think of a phrase less likely to conjure the thrill of a bold, swashbuckling adventure than “china cabinet.” Staid and middlebrow, it connotes fussiness, rigid domesticity, and the spectacle of collectible figurines being forced above their station in an aspirational display. It’s hard to defend, which might be why none of the pieces of furniture we browsed (nor the one we eventually bought) was described by its retailer as a “china cabinet,” though that is plainly what all of them were.
Even those that were made primarily from MDF or particleboard were styled with objects that echoed the contents of a wunderkammer: Platonic solids, sumptuously illustrated books, specimens of crystal or hard stone, and butterflies on pins were all items I clocked as we browsed. But using a glass-front cabinet to display a present-day re-creation of a late-Renaissance cabinet of curiosities runs up against the same challenge that period rooms do. The point isn’t to welcome your guests (or yourself) with a fictional account of someone else’s adventures; it’s to create a place for you to share your own.
There are probably scores of reasons for it, but one possible explanation is that the meaning of the china cabinet has changed because the meaning of china itself has changed. The message and implied client of a cabinet of wonders is at a minimum a titled, landed man with wealth and access. The china cabinet is the province of a housewife—and, if decorating advice columns of the 1920s are to be believed, an outmoded one at that.
Also known as a wunderkammer (“wonder room” in German) or a cabinet of curiosities in English, the cabinet of wonders is the primordial ooze from which encyclopedic museums of the European Enlightenment sprang, and it remains a source of fascination for collectors and even contemporary artists, such as Mark Dion and Jennifer Ling Datchuk.
Hoping to land a permanent position with Christian I, Elector of Saxony, art connoisseur Gabriel Kaltemarckt presented the ruler with his treatise How a Kunstkammer Should Be Formed, in 1587. This did not result in employment for Kaltemarckt, but it does provide a rare contemporary account of how an Early Modern expert believed a princely collection should take shape.
Kaltemarckt recommended three types of objects to form the core of a collection: 1) sculptures and paintings, 2) “curious items from home or abroad,” and 3) “antlers, horns, claws, feathers, and other things belonging to strange and curious animals.” Categories 2 and 3 sound as though they might overlap somewhat, but the vague parameters of “curious items” could also include objets de vertu that don’t quite fit the category of fine art or sculpture.
At a moment in European history when science still openly held hands with magic, late Renaissance and Early Modern nobility and royalty throughout Europe entered an unofficial race with one another to accumulate wonders. Among the earliest examples of glass displays were the cases that housed relics in Catholic churches—objects that needed to be seen (and protected) to be believed. Wunderkammern, which emerged on the heels of the Protestant Reformation, were designed at least in part to offer countervailing expressions of awe that were distinct from Catholic iconography.
The resulting accumulations of treasures came to be known as “princely collections.” These could comprise carved wood or ivory objects representing the Platonic solids; beautifully bound and illustrated books; rare gems, semiprecious stones, and corals; the taxidermied remains of an exotic animal, or its teeth or skeleton; scientific instruments crafted in brass or silver; and something from abroad that could not as yet be reproduced at home: translucent porcelain from Asia with brilliant blue glaze. (Europe would reach this milestone in 1709.)
The spirit that animated the cabinet of wonders was conquest, and it emerged at the same moment that Europe entered the age of discovery. The collection of fine ceramics was a very elite enterprise: Mary II of Great Britain (1662–1694) was an especially avid connoisseur, and even designed a pavilion at Hampton Court in the blue-and-white (of cobalt and porcelain) color palette of Chinese porcelain and of Delftware, which sought to imitate it through deft use of an opaque white glaze. Records from the end of the 17th century show that nearly 800 pieces of porcelain were on display in the queen’s apartments at Kensington Palace.
This kind of royal glamour is difficult to credibly transmit to a middle class home and, once the ceramics industry made porcelain an accessible luxury in the mid-19th century, the meaning of both china and cabinet changed. In The Delineator, an August, 1905, article about storage furniture opens with the declaration, “The china cabinet was the colonial housewife’s favorite possession.” The writer was most likely referring to a wooden cupboard, but the sentiment remains: Plate storage is women’s work, and not the royal kind. In an April, 1921, edition of the publication Home Furnisher, an advice columnist reassures a correspondent whose dining room lacks a built-in china cabinet that, “Where to put the extra dishes is indeed one of the most frequent cries heard from the housewife.”
But in her book Table Setting and Service for Mistress and Maid, published in 1928, Della Thompson Lutes addresses the question of tableware storage with a nod to creative expression: “This question puzzles a great many housewives. After all, it is a personal matter and an opportunity to show originality of thought and personality. The main point is not to have too many things on display.”
In the 1930s and ’40s, Americans were introduced to tableware that didn’t really qualify as china, per se: Eva Zeisel’s designs for Red Wing Pottery, Russel Wright’s American Modern dinnerware, and Edith Heath’s California casual table settings offered consumers unfussy, monochromatic pieces to use every day. The idea that these plates and bowls must be put away for special occasions missed the point entirely. More laid-back dining meant less need for the kind of storage a china cabinet offered and, indeed, the impulse to hide things within a streamlined piece of modern case furniture soon hit the mainstream. In 1944, George Nelson’s Storage Wall was featured in Life magazine. The idea was that Americans increasingly needed a place for their stuff—sports equipment, records and record players, toys and mementos—and a thicker wall with places to tuck things away in was an ideal solution.
In a way, this method has remained a stalwart of the well-kept middle class dwelling: an IKEA Billy or Kallax bookcase fitted with storage bins and attractive keepsakes, or Dieter Rams’s 606 Universal Shelving System for Vitsœ at the higher end are designed to transform a blank wall into a wrangling station for life’s treasures and oft-used gadgets.
Often as not, these shelving systems are presented as “storage solutions” that will hide clutter rather than as stages for display. Clutter, a plague of the industrial era that never bothered people living in less proliferative times, haunted the pages of decorating magazines and books of the postwar era the way it does videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram today.
An article in the September, 1968, issue of American Home, called “All the Things You Are,” explains the conundrum clearly: “People aren’t rolling stones that gather no moss or mementos or belongings. We’re more like rolling balls of taffy. Things keep getting stuck to us—books and baby pictures, tools and tennis rackets, flower vases and vacuum cleaners, electric blankets and Easter baskets. […] We need ‘our own things.’ They’re part of us and we’re part of them. They make us feel happy, warm, and special. Except, alas, when they make us feel cranky, unkempt, and claustrophobic.” An addendum offers decorating ideas for managing “creative clutter.”
This is as true now as it was in 1968 and, even if tariffs slow the avalanche of goods coming into port, Americans will continue to have lots of stuff and not be entirely sure how to hide or style it. That “clutter solutions” have eclipsed the discourse on treasuring objects and strategies for display makes it clear that our consumerist ways have taught us to see our “stuff” as transient—a problem to be solved, a temporary inconvenience, a stack of storage bins hanging out in a hallway until we graduate, or move, or sell the house.
Still, there are things we want to keep forever. When we were still looking for the right china cabinet, my husband and I took stock of what we wanted to be able to see in it. I wanted a view of a cherry maple box that my stepfather made by hand for our wedding, and a coffeepot made by an artist friend that featured a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wanted to see a stoneware sculpture in the shape of a sewing needle inscribed with the phrase “IF YOU WANT TO SEW, YOU’VE GOT TO THREAD THE NEEDLE.” The needle is “threaded” with thick yellow yarn. It was a gift from a friend when I left a demanding job in arts administration in which I had indeed “tried to sew” and drawn a little of my own metaphorical blood in the process.
My husband wanted to see a small vase that featured a portrait of Philadelphia’s unofficial mascot, Gritty, and a turquoise-glass bottle that came from a relative’s seltzer business in mid-20th-century Queens, New York. We had treasures—even wonders—and, in fact, we had china, and curiosities: teacups from a trip to Japan, and antique ceramic finds we’d stumbled upon together in New Jersey. Because we have cats, all these things (or, more accurately, their care and protection) were “problems to be solved,” but I would never describe any of them as clutter.
They each connect us to a person we admire or a family member we love, or to an adventure or an experience worth remembering. And they prompt the sharing of a story: When people come over, we can tell them about the parts of our lives that stand ready to be explained just behind their symbolic referents in our china cabinet.