The Best Place to Buy Dishes Is at the Museum Gift Shop

There seem to be two styles of popular housewares that make their way around the internet. First there are the impeccably chic ceramics in all manner of beige, handmade and certainly impressive but doing nothing to make my heart sing. And then there is the stuff with blobs of color and whimsical visual references that seems so self-consciously kitschy I can’t imagine incorporating it into any lasting aesthetic.

I wasn’t really thinking of this when I entered the gift shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently, after an afternoon of playing tourist with an out-of-town friend, enjoying the air conditioning and a look at tchotchkes of the Northern Renaissance. I wasn’t even in the market for salad plates. But when my partner spotted a set of six blue-and-white plates, each featuring a design of a different ceramic object in the museum, for sale, I suddenly questioned why we hadn’t been buying all of our kitchenware at museum stores. If you want your dinner table to have a distinct look, why not turn to our finest institutions of art and design?

Perhaps you’d like these teacups featuring a contemporary North American Indigenous design of an orca, from the National Museum of the American Indian. LACMA has plates with Robert Mapplethorpe photographs (not those ones), and splattered mugs made by locals in Echo Park. At the New-York Historical Society, you can get tea towels with the songbirds of John James Audubon, or a table runner featuring a Louis C. Tiffany peacock design. And at the Art Institute of Chicago you can get a set of glasses with designs by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Blue & White Salad Plate Set

• $30

Prices taken at time of publishing.

• $30 at The Met