A couple of years ago, my husband John McCauley and I decided to finally renovate our kitchen. We had lived for years with a drab old room replete with burgundy linoleum from the 1970s to go with lime green cupboards. I’m pretty sure the person who lived in the house before us and supervised that remodel was colorblind or insane or both. John thinks he lost a bet.
Even though we live on a busy street, we decided we wanted a country kitchen for our remodel, a calm and peaceful haven anytime we needed it. We wanted something that looked like part of a bed and breakfast, or off a magazine page. And so we begin to create a rooster kitchen.
Let me say first that kitchen decor with roosters wasn’t just some random idea John and I hijacked for little reason. John grew up on a farm and, cliche as it may sound, he awoke to the sound of the same rooster for years. Roosters have incredible lifespans, sometimes as long as 20 years, and John eventually named the resident rooster on his farm Winston. He lived almost long enough to come to our wedding.
I spotted a rooster apron at the grocery store one afternoon and bought it for John as a surprise, and the idea grew from there. John loved his gift (he uses it when he barbecues), as well as the general idea of rooster design kitchen decor, and we went online that night to buy rooster towels and other rooster kitchen decor. I have since learned that there are rooster plates, rooster salt and pepper shakers, and every conceivable fabric item with a rooster on it. We now have more roosters than a chicken factory.
Of course, matching rooster design kitchen decor won’t make a country kitchen on its own. Besides kitchen roosters, we also purchased an old wood kitchen table and chairs and wrought iron light fixtures, and we painted the kitchen harvest yellow with fire engine red window treatments. It was important to us that all of our kitchen decor have a rustic look to it, and if we didn’t necessarily get all matching kitchen stuff, we at least tried to find things that roughly coincided. I think it came out looking super.
Technically, we’re still on the same busy street, but some mornings, John jokes he can hear Winston’s call.
