The Must-Have Kitchen Essential That Can Double As Chic, Functional Decor

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Plenty of everyday kitchen tools — can openers, vegetable peelers, the single-purpose salad spinners we adore — dutifully perform their dedicated tasks without much aesthetic appeal. Other expensive items can start to seem purely decorative if, say, the stand mixer intended to inspire oodles of baking projects starts collecting dust and little else. However, a few special essentials strike the balance of form and function so successfully that you hardly have to think about additional decorating at all: Copper pots are the classic of the genre and plenty of dishes are explicitly made for display, but it's an old workhorse cutting board that can add some beauty to your counter tableau.

The best cutting boards to pull double duty as décor are made of wood. The slashes made in plastic read as worn rather than distinguished, glass is quick to collect fingerprints and other unsightly smudges, and, pretty as it is, marble can actually damage your precious knives. Instead, those maple, cherry, and walnut slabs take their dings with dignity (and also better extend the time between at-home knife sharpenings). There are also a few ways to literally set them up for maximum appeal.

Can you leave a cutting board laying around and call it a style? Kind of, but only if it's a looker, such as the Sonder Los Angeles grooved teak cutting board. Otherwise, keep proportions and potential cutting board clusters paramount in navigating what looks intentional versus what looks like you've just failed to clean up after cooking.

Just like the expert charcuterie selections that top these very materials, abundance is the shortcut to a sumptuous appearance. Break out the biggest cutting board in your arsenal and casually lean it lengthwise against your backsplash for a tidy visual that also signals plenty of home cooking activity. If you've got a standard height between your top and bottom cabinets, and enough counter space left over to actually work with, the Teakhaus 20-by-15-inch carving board slots in nicely. Smaller spaces can create a similar effect with stacks: A trio of more petite boards, such as the Freshware bamboo cutting boards, can lean like vinyl albums to approximate a similar vibe while keeping everything within reach.