In our small apartment's kitchen there's very little counter or cupboard space (the tall cupboard houses the water heater), so I built a kitchen island to provide some storage and an ample countertop. For the pots and pans, I built a sculptural ceiling-mounted rack to hang above the island, using the offcuts from the fabrication of its countertop.
This was a more-ambitious project than I expected, namely due to the structural challenges inherent in hanging a bunch of metal from a plaster ceiling. I really loved finding the right balance between piece's overall rectangular shape and the seemingly random alignment of all of its structural members. Finally, I find that this is a very beautiful piece which complements the kitchen island as the centrepiece of our kitchen.
The pot rack is affixed to the ceiling through seven angled legs into a routered rectangular base that's solidly anchored to the ceiling's structure.
The pot rack is the most sculptural of the strorage solutions i installed to make the most of the small space.
My raw material was the pile of offcuts from the kitchen island's countertop.
Since I planned on trimming the trellis to the same rectangular profile as the countertop, I laid out potential alignments of its components on the counter to try them out.
Once I had a configuration I liked, I used screws of different lengths to connect each pair of slats wherever they crossed. Since the offcuts were all from the final pass of wider pallet planks through the table saw, I kept the rough side facing upwards with the screws.
Once I'd connected all of the struts and trimmed the rack to size, I needed to determine how high it should hang and create some legs to keep it there.
I opted for a series of seven legs, again installed at seemingly random angles to reinforce the theme of the horizontal plane. This solution also allowed me to drive standard screws vertically into the rack and the ceiling.
Since the support points had no relation to any structural elements within the plaster ceiling, I designed the rack to screw into a base which could be solidly affixed to the ceiling.
Finding suitable structural members within the plaster ceiling was an interesting challenge. I relied heavily on major structural beams near two opposite corners, while also spreading some of the force to some of the ceiling's secondary wood structures which supported the plaster's lathes.
Using a series of 20 strategically placed hardware elements recessed into the panel, I could be confident that it would indeed support as much weight as I hung from the pot rack.
The various hardware took a while to finally cinch the panel snugly against the ceiling.
After caulking the routered edge against the ceiling, plastering over all of the recessed screw heads, and giving the panel a few coats of paint, it is now an integral part of the building's structure.
Once the rack was safely attached to the ceiling, it was time to choose hanging locations for each presentable pot and pan in our collection.
I installed a series of antique-style hooks which I sourced at a specialised hardware store in Québec's Old City.
Hanging perfectly above the kitchen island I built a few months prior, the pot rack provides us a beautiful and convenient way to store and access our pots and pans.
Sculptural pot rack, mounted solidly on our kitchen ceiling.
