My New French Kitchen Tried to Kill Me

Reframing Your Point of View When Bad, Sad or Scary Things Happen

It wasn’t the fanciest kitchen, nor the most photogenic. It wasn’t the biggest or the most state-of-the-art. But it was the very best most wonderful little Parisian cuisine ever, because my husband made it for me just last year.

So when a freak accident this summer damaged it all and nearly took me out too, it was upsetting, to say the least.

Read on for the scary deets, the little-known eastern philosophy you can use to reframe any less-than-perfect situation, and one of my most popular yummy autumnal recipes to make us all whole again.

My sweet Monsieur B spent months before our wedding, planning and organizing the renovation of the kitchen we would soon share when I moved from New York City to Paris to start our new life together. He made 3D renderings, talked to five different cuisinistes in our area, and hauled out endless bags of gravel the day before we left for our pre-nuptial celebrations in Fontainebleau, about an hour outside of the Métropole.

We are fous de food and wine. That means we’re crazy for them both. Monsieur B knows every single thing about French cheese, and I think he fell in love with me on our second date when he heard me chatting up the sommelier in a little restaurant on the Rue de la Roquette that I’d picked for our dinner.

We love to shop for food and cook together. I’m constantly surprised at how confident he is with both French classics and less traditional dishes, and after having lived for years (in my distant past) with a tout petit (read: very small) chef who refused to even be in our Manhattan kitchen with me “because there isn’t enough room,” I am now overwhelmed by how fun it is to cook in this even smaller Paris cuisine with my tall, broad-shouldered, handsome husband who moves effortlessly through the space, flipping crêpes and flambéeing stuff.

I say all of this to say, this kitchen means everything to me, way beyond a place to make food.

So. Un jour de pluie (one rainy day), I was working from home. As usual, I had two of our balcony doors open, which creates a lovely traversant (breezy) effect that I especially appreciate because like most people in France, we don’t have air conditioning. It wasn’t raining hard at all, but I did close the back balcony door at one point because the wind kicked up a bit and was blowing my papers around.

I went to the kitchen for another cup of coffee and to charge my phone on the new USB wall charger that Monsieur B had quietly installed as he’d noticed that I sometimes like to work with my laptop resting on the countertop, a kind of snacking-standing desk opportunity.

Key to the next part of the story are the big double windows over our sink, which open, as most French windows do, inwards from the side (which disturbed me at first as there are no screens) or tilted from the top to let a little air in without risking a bird invasion or too much breeze.

As I said, these windows are a pair, so you could open them wide, almost like doors. We never do that, but we do always have the right panel tilted open from the top, even when we’re not home. I think we see it as just ventilation, keeping air moving through the space and into our entrée and salon.

I’m standing there, leaning my hip on the left countertop, about three steps back from the sink, reading my phone while it’s charging, drinking a frothy café crème, when all of a sudden I hear something and look up.

It’s the sound of a vacuum, of air sucking backwards. By the time I raise my head, the top of the window has banged shut loudly. I don’t move and I say something uncool like, “Whoa!” in disbelief (I would’ve preferred “Putain !” to make the story feel more fully French, but it was American instincts kicking in).

At that very moment, the same window panel burst out of the frame and into the kitchen, flying forward a few inches, then dropping onto our new granite countertop, falling onto our coffeemaker, flipping over and off the stovetop before scraping not one but two different columns of our new Italian oak cupboards, nicking our floor in several spots, and finally coming to rest just in front of my feet.

I took this photo the moment after the enormous window flew in and landed at my feet.

The whole thing happened so fast—maybe it was three or five seconds—but I hadn’t moved at all. Despite how close a call it was, how near this weaponized window had come to striking me, I’d just stood there, my mouth in full gape, awestruck by the violence and improbability of what was apparently going on.

It was so loud and brash for an instant, and then everything went completely silent for a few seconds once the huge window came to rest against our new oak cupboards. But then the wind whipped back up through the large new open hole in our wall. No screens, just howling angry air and me with my hands shaking, trying to call my husband at work.

He couldn’t believe me either. “Quoi ?” he said.

“Viens,” I said. Come. “La fenêtre voulait me tuer.” The window tried to kill me.

I was attempting to be funny, but I was also crying a weird kind of tears where you can’t quite get a grip on reality yet you realize that while something very bad has happened, something much worse was narrowly avoided. Do you know what I mean?

While I waited for Monsieur B to come home, I tried to move the window. I couldn’t even pick it up or slide it one centimeter, and I’ve got a strong core. The thing is a beast. Luckily my dear époux (spouse) is a bricoleur (do-it-yourselfer) and just a general badass, so he not only moved the offending fixture to the couloir (the hallway). He also boarded up the window, called l’assurance (the insurance company), and gave me a kiss.

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Ça va couter la peau des fesses
(It’s gonna cost the skin off your ass, aka “a lot”)

Once the reality of an accident or any difficult situation sets in, we all have to go into “fix this” mode, no? It’s like, OK, that happened, now let’s get it taken care of. It helps us feel more in control, and we’re sure it won’t be as bad as we think.

Well, in assessing the damage, we found out the following:

• Complete window and frame will need replacing: €3000

• Brand new granite countertop cracked in three places: €6000 (because they won’t be able to match the stone)

• Steel plaque (stovetop) dented: €1000

• Oak rangements (cabinets) scratched and scraped: €1500

• Refinish floor: €500

• No French person has ever heard of this type of thing happening

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When the News Gets Worse, What Do You Say?

Why does insurance never seem to cover what actually happens? Has this ever happened to you? It seems our French policy will not cover the damages because they cannot find evidence of une tempête (classified by the claims agent as a storm with winds over 100 kilometers per hour) on the day this happened.

When we told them I was standing right there and saw it go down, their only reply was, “Vous auriez dû fermé la fenêtre.” You should’ve closed the window.

As my teenage Parisian stepson likes to say, “Merci, Captain Obvious.”

As I like to say, “Bordel de merde.” (Kind of like “fucking shit, y’all.”)

What do you like to say in this situation?

Takeaway: How to Reframe the Shitty Shit That Happens

Do you agree that one key to life is in being able to actively switch up your POV from time to time? You know, trying to really see something differently in an effort to move forward? I don’t mean denying reality or stuffing down feelings, but just looking for a new way to see it all that puts things into perspective.

Well, that took me a minute in this case, because I was pissed. Although of course I know there are much worse things happening in the world right now (and always), I was getting pretty darned upset about all this. My thoughts were racing. Was it my fault? Why didn’t I close the window? How can it cost this much money to fix things after everything we spent last year just to create it?

I was really mad that my perfect kitchen, my brand new kitchen in my brand new life, had been wrecked. That’s what I was ruminating on until another thought occurred to me:

Wait. Did I almost die?

And wait. Isn’t everything actually OK?

As a designer, I had been very much focused on, “who do we call to replace all this like new as fast as possible?” That is, that was my attitude until we got the devis (the cost proposals) and word from the insurance company that they wouldn’t be reimbursing us.

It’s not that we couldn’t pay for everything if we wanted to, so I know we are lucky. And we do have to bite the bullet on the window frame and fixtures. There’s no getting around that unless we want to start an “outdoor living in Paris” Instagram account where we see what comes in through the hole.

But more seriously, I simply couldn’t reconcile the idea of ripping out and throwing away meters of beautiful stone just to replace one small part that now has three middle-finger-long sized cracks running right down in front of where you stand to cook.

One day I was looking at these “fuck-you” cracks in the countertop, thinking about how unfair this all is and how it hurts my heart to see something so new get damaged, not from wear and tear or years of happy cooking together, but by three seconds of the Force of Nature (and also maybe suboptimal window fabrication). I was fixating about how I couldn’t bear wasting so much money to fix aesthetics again, when things were actually still functioning. That’s when an unexpected phrase just popped into my mind.

“Wabi-sabi.”

“Say what?”

Hear me out. I’ll make it quick.

Wabi-sabi is an eastern philosophy that embraces and welcomes the transience and impermanence of life, and celebrates the beauty of imperfection. I’d originally read about it in a piece in the New York Times years ago which involved Robert DeNiro and a luxury hotel, but I hope you won’t hold that against me. In fact, it’s a transformational and life-changing idea that can be applied far beyond interior design. It’s a way of seeing things, of embracing them, with all their flaws.

If you’re intrigued, maybe take a look at this Wikipedia article for the wabi-sabi basics because it is such a truly helpful and deep concept to reframe so many challenges in life—furniture-related and otherwise. My favorite citations in the online roundup are these:

Another description of wabi-sabi by Andrew Juniper notes that, "If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi."

For Richard Powell, "Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

The reason why I wanted to share this with you is that the minute I let this idea of imperfect beauty and impermanence into my mind, the whole kitchen debacle just fell away and that “serene melancholy and spiritual longing” flowed right into the cracks where the hurt was before. I just can’t tell you how it altered my perspective. I’m not kidding. I now actively love those cracks.

Our kitchen is wabi-sabi, just like us. It’s beautifully imperfect, flawed but functional, a little rough in spots but shiny with real love and gratitude.

Is there something in your life you could reframe with a little wabi-sabi? Your work? Your home? Your relationship with your mother? Could you embrace the nicked spots, the scars, and the scrapes as a welcome part of your journey? Do you have another trick/technique for repositioning difficult circumstances? Hope you’ll share in the comments, my dear folks! We can all use good advice.

While you ponder your own philosophical outlook, why not comfort yourself with this deliciously autumnal Slow-simmered Leek and Chicken Soup. It’s warm and wonderful, and I made it in our happy little banged up kitchen in Paris.

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