The Home You Own

Before renovating your kitchen, ask: What would Julia Child do?

You don’t need walls of French cookware to borrow a page from the legendary chef’s iconic space.

6 min
Julia Child in 2002, after her kitchen was moved from her home and rebuilt as an installation at the National Museum of American History in Washington. (Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)
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For decades, Julia Child’s kitchen in Cambridge, Mass., served as her headquarters: a place to cook and to develop recipes, of course, but also where she filmed three of her now-classic cooking shows.

The chef, cookbook author and ebullient television personality, who died in 2004, made it her life’s mission to help people become comfortable with — and even savor — cooking. (The modern day Instagram influencers who film from their kitchens owe a debt of gratitude to this pioneer of the genre.) As you’d expect of any culinary mastermind, Julia and her husband, Paul, were intentional about how best to set up the all-important space when they moved to the home in 1961.

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