Twenty-first century dish racks

A recent trip to my local Container Store left me impressed with recent improvements in dish racks. Impressed by dish racks? I was surprised, too.

Growing up, our kitchen housed a large, stainless steel monstrosity of a dish rack. It was always on the counter and always holding dishes. You probably had the same dish rack in your home. I don’t own a dish rack now, however, because I predominantly own only dishwasher-safe kitchen utensils, dinnerware, and cooking supplies. In the rare event that I need to wash something by hand, I just lay out a dishtowel and set items to dry on it.

Many homes, though, are without a dishwasher and owners have to sacrifice counter space for a dish rack the same way we did when I was a kid. A walk through the kitchen supply section at the Container Store showed me that dish racks aren’t the space eating devices they used to be. Clearly, not being a handwasher of dishes has left me clueless to innovation. I found a whole world of space-saving, uncluttered options.

My favorite rack was the Sesamo manufactured by Snips and designed by i Casalinghi (pictured at right). Unfortunately, the Sesamo is not available yet through the Container Store’s website, but it’s for sale in the brick and mortar stores.

There also was an innovative In-Sink Dish Drainer that suspends itself from the sides of the sink.

When I arrived home, I found a slew of in-sink and collapsible rack designs on the internet. I even found the sexy Dish Doctor, which is designed by Marc Newson and produced by Magis, that wouldn’t be too horrible looking to leave on your counter continuously.

I’m certain that there are other, innovative, uncluttered dish racks out there that I’m missing. Most importantly, though, I’m just glad to see that the days of oversized, cumbersome dish racks are behind us. Let us know of any uncluttered dish racks you’ve encountered in our comments’ section!

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Posted by Erin on Dec 4, 2007 | Comments |

22 comments posted

  1. Posted by Lars Wirzenius - 12/04/2007

    In Finland we typically have a cupboard above the sink with racks for drying hand-washed dishes. If one has few dishes, it works as a place to store them as well. This seems more practical to me than having something on a counter top.

    http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.....060227.jpg

  2. Posted by Emil Sandin - 12/04/2007

    Lars, I was going to write the same thing as you. I wonder if it’s only here in Finland we do it this way? Nice to see another finnish reader, by the way.

  3. Posted by Deanna - 12/04/2007

    I’d love to have my dishes dry above the sink, problem is, I live in an inner city apartment, and my landlord has these really pathetic cabinets above the sink. I don’t trust them to hold many dishes as is, introducing moisture to the crummy MDF would probably result in me paying for new cabinets…ick.

  4. Posted by Marie - 12/04/2007

    In many NYC apartments, we barely have room for a kitchen, let alone a dish rack!

  5. Posted by Mary - 12/04/2007

    We had the same cabinets when I lived in Spain. I often wondered why American kitchens don’t have them.

  6. Posted by Adam - 12/04/2007

    When I’m at school, I have access to a dishwasher which is a great thing in my opinion, just put the dishes away until the washer needs run. No clutter. But at home it’s manual so they sit on the counter and then sit in the rack. I think I’ll try to pick up one of these nicer racks for my mom to help unclutter the counter.

  7. Posted by Nancy - 12/04/2007

    Lars & Emil, that looks interesting, but: 1) doesn’t the water from the wet dishes warp the wood on the bottom? 2) in New York City, we have so little space that having to use a cupboard (or 2 as in the photo that you’ve referenced) takes up even more space than the 10″ counter space allotted between my sink & my fridge.

    I have a stainless steel rack that looks closest to the ‘collapsible’ rack referenced above. I don’t think it looks like a monstrosity (of course, I’m comparing to that big plastic tub thing in my Grandmother’s home that holds glasses on plastic spokes around the perimeter). In NYC, most buildings don’t allow us to have dishwashers (or washing machines) in our homes, so it’s expected to have a dish rack out on the counter.

  8. Posted by Becky - 12/04/2007

    I was just looking for a solution to this last night! I love the finish solution, but I don’t think the landlord would be happy with it. So far I think I will go with a wall mounted collapsible dish drainer. The only one I have been able to find is from IKEA.
    http://www.ikea.com/us/en/cata.....s/40110351
    I called a store and it has to be hung with their system. I’d love to find something like this that is less expensive.

  9. Posted by Karen - 12/04/2007

    Nancy, I had a rack-in-a-cupboard like that in my apartment in Moscow. The racks were built into the cupboard, which had a roof and four walls, but no “floor.” That’s why the cupboard was over the sink. Wash, rinse, stash, forget, and the water drips off the dishes right into the sink. I looked at Lars’s picture and couldn’t really tell if there was a floor or not. I suppose if the floor is made of cedar or some other extremely hard wood, it might not be a problem. Or if the floor is tilted just enough to let the water run down and out?

    Generally, it’s a great setup and I have wished for it in the US. My first preference is to have a window over the sink, but if there isn’t a window and won’t ever be, then a rack/cupboard is a great choice, especially for an unclutterer.

  10. Posted by Janne - 12/04/2007

    Nancy & Karen, the cupboard is always open from the bottom. Any water from the dishes drips through the racks/shelves to the sink below.

    Practically all kitchens in Finland have this layout with the drying cabinet above the sink. It’s not just for drying dishes though. People also store their machine-washed (everyday) dishes there so it doesn’t really take any extra space.

    More cluttered people may store their nicer sets of plates and glassware elsewhere. These cabinets may well have glass doors.

  11. Posted by Louise - 12/04/2007

    Since our counters are dark granite and our appliances are black, we keep a small black dish rack out all the time. It disappears visually. I like the Sesamo, but I think it would stand out more because it is mostly white.

    We had a small stainless steel and clear plastic model that I thought looked sharp initially. Unfortunately, clear plastic shows water spots and hard water deposits really quickly.

    We have so little storage space here in our RV that finding a place to put the rack away out of sight is a bigger burden than having it out. Even one that folds flat still needs a flat space big/tall enough to store. RV cabinets can be very small!

    There are no cabinets over the sink, so the “Finnish Way” wouldn’t work for us.

  12. Posted by Gina - 12/04/2007

    The shelves and bottom of those drying cabinets is wire shelving (for those who wondered how dishes would stay in a cabinet without a bottom) and they’re available all over Europe as far as I can tell (friends in the Netherlands have them also.) That’s easy enough to do to any cabinet already installed over a sink. For a similar solution, IKEA has wall-mount racks that can hang on metal bars arranged in various configurations along the backsplash.

  13. Posted by Trevor Bramble - 12/04/2007

    I’ve seen the same cabinets in the Napoli region of Italy.

    There was a LOT of cooking and eating going on at the house I would visit, and the cabinet seemed very efficient.

    Amusingly, it seems that some of her (quite grown) children have since gifted her with a dish-washing machine. She has no idea what to do with it and keeps washing the dishes by hand, then setting them in the machine’s racks to dry.

    Of course, everyone is Italian, so this leads to a lot of shouting and gesturing. ;^)

    I just wonder what she’ll do with those cabinets now.

  14. Posted by twosandalz - 12/05/2007

    I love the sheer capacity of the old-style dish drainers. But they are such counter hogs. It’d be great to have one of those that collapses flat to store easily under the sink or hung from the wall.

  15. Posted by Quatrefoil - 12/05/2007

    I use a standard stainless steel dish drainer, and when I’ve finished washing up and the dishes have dried (either with a teatowel or naturally) I put them away and hang the drainer on a hook on the side of a cupboard. It’s simple, it gets it out of sight and gives me the draining board space back. Total cost about $10 (drainer and hook).

  16. Posted by Lidia - 12/06/2007

    This “Sesamo” item is really quite an ugly piece of plastic junk and hardly compact at all. I’m surprised the Unclutterer would recommend it.

    I live in Italy where the over-sink cabinet is the norm; only my kitchen doesn’t have it! I use a two-tier wooden rack that I got at Bowl & Board in Cambridge, MA in about 1980. It folds to about 1″ thick.

    http://www.stacksandstacks.com/image/10368ll.jpg
    $12.99

    If it were to break, you could fix it. If you really don’t need it any more, you could burn it in the fireplace or compost it or turn it into chopsticks or whatever.

  17. Posted by Twitchy - 12/08/2007

    I don’t have a dishrack because the majority of our dishes land in the dishwasher, and the rest whivh is washed by hand must be dried immediately and put away as they cannot rest and gather dust in a dishrack. My 2c.

  18. Posted by Joe Blow - 12/24/2007

    I saw the type of drying-cabinets (linked above at the top of the comments by the Finns) when I visited a friend’s house in Toronto. Her mom was Finnish. It’s a wonderful way to multi-task — your storage cabinet is also your drying rack, so things go straight from the wet sink to the put-away.

    But …

    If we put those things in our cabinets in New Orleans we’d have mildew, maybe even toxic black mold, all over our dishes in about an hour. You can’t put wet stuff up in cabinets here, you have to be more careful about dampness. Many New Orleanians in the Victorian frame architectural beauties regularly bleach the interior walls of our houses to kill the oozies and goozies. “Modern” surfaces don’t make a difference — they’ll just weep.

  19. Posted by Faye - 12/25/2007

    I do like the finnish draining solution. I live near New Orleans so I know what Joe Blow is referring to because we do have a very humid climate. Suggestions I would have for this would be no doors instead use curtains. That way air could circulate, also I would suggest at the bottom adding a drainboard tray to solve the delima of retained moisture in the bottom,perhaps to where you could slide it in like a drawer. Then if you wanted to color coordinate your kitchen you could change out to a chosen color. A thick coating of polyeurathane would protect the other wood.

  20. Posted by suze - 12/27/2007

    Has anyone seen a type of handwash rack which fits over a grill which drains into the sink drain? I don’t know where I saw it or how it was incorporated into the counter so that there was still room for a sink in front of it. It sure looked great and I want one

  21. Posted by Colin - 05/11/2008

    Can someone post a link to a supplier (of over-sink cupboards with racks) in Finland, Italy or Spain?
    Perhaps a manufacturer could export them to a local distributor?

  22. Posted by LiLi - 05/12/2008

    I love the Sesamo, Snip dish rack but I wish it was made of stainless steel instead of the hard plastic. It is rare that I get to fold it up, but when I do, I feel great! The con is that the inside base get filled with yellow crud if one doesn’t consistently clean it weekly or bi-monthly. My husband and I have gone through the mini stainless steel dish rack and it is too small as well as the ugly plastic white one with a rubber water mat. (To Lidia, have you ever seen the Sesamo dish rack in person? It really is nicely constructed and it’s not as ugly as the other ones in the market. As for the wooden rack that you like, it’s really too big for a single person and a couple—it’s a dish rack made for a family.)

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