How I created America’s most hated kitchen

You have not lived until you have been called “tacky and tasteless,” or been labeled as someone who has created “the ugliest thing I have ever seen.” But those are the sort of comments I get every time my Warhol-inspired kitchen appears on a decorating website. 

The first time it happened, I have to admit, I was taken aback. A popular shelter magazine website featured my kitchen and gave it a glowing write-up. I was hoping for some positive feedback, and lo and behold, I was thrilled to see that in a few hours, my article had racked up five pages of comments. Five pages! But then I read them. Uh-oh. Commenters had their pitchforks out for me. They were so offended by my design, they not only attacked the kitchen, they skewered me as a designer. Although one out of every 50 comments was a positive one, saying something like, “I can appreciate the creativity,” the mob became further incensed by any compliment, and voted thumbs down on the comment so it would be downgraded and deleted. I felt like a Kardashian.

I did not create my Warhol kitchen to make people vomit, as some commenters have suggested. I wanted a fun, colorful kitchen that would make me happy. My kitchen used to be all white. It had that clean European look, which was one of the reasons I liked it. But as I added color to the rest of my home, the kitchen remained white — and sterile. And when my condo was filmed for the HGTV show “Kitty Bartholomew: You’re Home,” the kitchen was the one room they did not film because, compared to the rest of the house, it was boring. The host, Kitty Bartholomew, pulled me aside and told me I had to do something about that kitchen. 

Fast forward a few years, and I was at the closing day of the Andy Warhol exhibition at MOCA. I was very inspired by the artwork, and I stopped in the museum store to get some souvenirs. It being the last day, all the Andy Warhol posters were 40 percent off. Standing in the middle of that museum store, inspiration hit me: I decided right then and there that I was going to buy one of every poster and decoupage it to my kitchen cabinets. 

I don’t know why I thought that would be a good idea, as I didn’t know whether the posters would even fit the cabinets, and, more important, I had never decoupaged anything before. For those of you unfamiliar with it, decoupage is the art of applying decorative paper to a surface. You typically see it on smaller objects such as boxes and trays, but never on such a large scale.

So, I did what any intelligent person who wanted to learn how to do something would do — I Googled it. And I found the nation’s leading expert on decoupage, Durwin Rice, author of “New Decoupage.” I emailed him, asking how I should go about putting the posters onto the cabinet doors. I wanted it to look like the artwork was printed on the cabinets, not merely glued on. Would that be possible?

Rice kindly replied, explaining the process for what I wanted to do. I was most skeptical of one of the steps — soaking the poster in water to relax the paper — because I was afraid the water would ruin it. But his directions worked! I’ve illustrated the steps above to show how easy it really is. And I’m happy to report that people who’ve followed the directions on my website have created their own versions of the Warhol kitchen, albeit with posters that reflect their own personal styles. One person, after she got tired of her decoupaged cabinets, even replaced the images with new ones by soaking the cabinets in water, scraping off the paper and starting anew. I’ve also become a decoupage fiend, decorating chairs, tables and even toilets. I haven’t shared those yet on social media — they would break the Internet.

Nowadays, I take negative online comments with a grain of salt. And I actually appreciate the really nasty ones, because at least they mean my work got a reaction. As an artist, I’d rather be hated than ignored. And you can’t ignore that kitchen.

CREATE YOUR OWN WARHOL KITCHEN

” target=”_blank”>jonathanfongstyle.com.