‘It’s the epicentre of the kitchen’

For cookery author and columnist Skye McAlpine, an island is a must-have for a sociable space

I’ve always wanted to have a kitchen island: it somehow says ‘proper grown-up-kitchen’. The pros are obvious: extra surface area to cook on (which, when you’re both as keen and as messy a cook as I am, comes in very useful), and extra storage space – ours, for example, has a shelf underneath where I store pots, pans, mixing bowls and so on, as well as a drawer for chopping boards and kitchen knives. I also like to dress our island prettily with colourful hand-painted jugs from my brand, Tavola (either filled with flowers or even empty), and with bowls of fresh fruit and vegetables. But the magic of the kitchen island, I have found, is that it’s the epicentre of the kitchen: people naturally gravitate to it. Kitchen islands have a force all of their own. When I’m cooking, that’s where I choose to centre myself, and everything else happens around me: pots bubbling away on the stove, cakes baking in the oven… But also, when I make breakfast for my sons, or when we have a quick and easy, improvised kitchen supper (scrambled eggs on toast, peanut butter sandwiches or what have you), we tend to eat at the kitchen island. They sit on high stools, while I can simultaneously be with them and busy myself buttering toast. Often those kitchen-island meals are my favourites, because they have an informality and cosiness that doesn’t quite happen at the dining table in the same way. A similar principle applies when I host dinner parties: on the island I always lay out bowls of nuts, olives, crisps, a hunk of cheese with a little dish of honey for dipping, and guests gather round with their drinks, nibbling and chatting amongst themselves, and to me, while I toss the salad and do whatever I have to do to get dinner on the table.