Over the years we’ve been given a number of beautiful oversized platters which we love to use for celebrations of all sorts. We’ve discovered they are too oddly-shaped to fit stacked on a shelf in our renovated kitchen cabinets, but would if we could find a way to stand them up. Using wire plate display stands for each platter would prove unwieldy and take up too much room. So we started to look around for another option.

We found it in the form of an inexpensive plate holder from Crate and Barrel: basically two wooden bars held in place by dowels, with dowels placed vertically at about 1″ intervals to hold plates: a tinker-toy of a plate holder.

Our platters need bigger spacing to balance upright properly so we decided to try hacking the plate holder by removing some of the upright dowels.

…We used an adjustable plyers to twist some out of their holes…

…Then we tested the new spacing we’d made to see if our platters would balance well, with no danger of tipping.

It works like a charm. We can remove and replace the dowels at will, configuring the holder to suit our needs (while being able to reconfigure them down the line, if need be).

The plate holders come in 9.5-inch and 15-inch lengths. The smaller ones made best use of our 11 3/4″ interior cabinet depth, since the back platter needs room to tilt back a bit.

We’re going to buy another pair to store odd kitchen items: pot lids, wire racks, food processor blades – and make the most of the limited space we have.

Related posts: a guide to “found” and treasured dishes
rethinking a dish rack
pascal anson on (cheap) kitchen cabinets
swell rigged kitchen island on sawhorses
alt plastic food bag solutions: re-usable cloth, mesh, or freeform…?