Hang Your Kitchen Tools—or Dining Room Chairs—From a Classic Shaker Peg Rail

By Wilder Davies

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If I asked you to name a group of people best known for their appreciation of well-designed furniture, a belief in the complete equal standing of the sexes, and a propensity for communal living situations, you might answer: gay 30-something creatives living in Brooklyn. While you wouldn't necessarily be wrong, I’m actually talking about the Shakers. An early-American Christian sect that split from the Quakers to live in small communities to practice celibacy, simple living, and charismatic worship, most people today know the Shakers for their furniture. Shaker woodwork is beloved for its sparseness, honesty, and lack of filigree, and it actually bore significant influence on Danish designers responsible for today's well-loved midcentury-modern furniture style.

Maybe the Shaker design ethos stands the test of time because it appeals to the broader desire among many to escape the city for a simple, pastoral life. The designs speak to the enduring appeal of minimalism. And there's perhaps no piece of Shaker woodwork that's as ubiquitous, or as easy to bring into your own home, as the Shaker peg rail.

Iterations of the peg rail have hung in mudrooms and entryways and been for sale in Pottery Barn mail-order furniture catalogs for decades. These peg rails have adapted to suit the design tastes of the time—Tuscan revival, modern farmhouse, Scandinavian et cetera, but were never more than coat racks. Recently, though, designers and DIY’ers have really brought peg rail out of the mudroom and into the rest of the house, the way you might see them implemented in a historic Shaker dwelling (or in a certain up-and-coming Shaker-inspired Manhattan restaurant), where peg rails span across entire walls and rooms and fulfill myriad uses.

In the kitchen (especially the cabinet-sparse kitchens of today), a peg rail can serve many purposes. Hang your most-used tools on it—your spatulas, strainers, wood spoons—and they’ll always be within immediate reach. Near the sink, a peg rail can hold dish gloves, towels, and scrub brushes; hang one closer to the oven and use it as a pot rack. Because many peg rails double as single-tier shelving, they can function as a place to hold mugs, spices, tea and coffee, and vases, or serve as a display shelf for the lumpy ceramics you made in that workshop. If you need additional shelving, you can even install shelves that hang from the pegs, like you see in this kitchen. Unlike cabinets, peg rails—by nature of their high visibility—also have a way of discouraging clutter. You can't really hide anything when it's hanging right in front of you.

Even in a kitchen with plenty of cabinets, a peg rail installed across a bare wall becomes a place to hang brooms and dust brushes, aprons, or baskets. You can hang herbs on it to dry, or use it to keep your reusable grocery bags in sight so you don't forget them on your way out the door.

In a dining room, you can really take full advantage of what the Shakers intended for the peg rail by hanging furniture on the pegs while you clean the floors. Shakers designed their signature chairs in part so that they could hang them on the walls for sweeping. The list goes on.

The vast of majority of people aren't going to go full Shaker and install wall to wall peg rail in every room of their house. As much as I’d love to do that in my rented apartment, I would like my deposit back eventually. But, even with a small one, I've discovered some of that Shaker practicality. The row of pegs in my kitchen have a few permanent residents (a duster and some aprons), but much of it is bare most of the time, coming in handy when I least expect it. It suddenly serves as a place to hang up the damp shirt I just spot cleaned, or as a place to put the keys to my friend's apartment where I’m cat-sitting.

So often I think we seek to organize our surroundings with specific solutions that address existing clutter, but there's something to be said about creating a space that anticipates the experience of not knowing where to put something, while also preventing you from storing it away entirely and forgetting about it. In essence the peg rail is the anti junk drawer. Sure, it can be strewn with all matter of practical goods when you need it, but even if you leave it completely bare, it will wait patiently and quietly, (like a shaker/polite gay adult) until you need it once again. It's in the unexpected functions that the true genius of the peg rail lies.