Pair of Paneled Cupboards, Hand-Stripped Layered Paint with Kræmmerhus Decalcomanias, c. 1930–1945

The Piece

Two cupboards, sold together, each 58 inches high, 42 inches wide, and only 12 inches deep. Plain pre-war frame-and-panel casework: two recessed-panel doors meeting at a center stile, a stepped cornice applied across the top, three fixed shelves within, an open back. The hardware is original throughout — nickel bar latches at the closure, cast turn-buttons set into the corners of each door frame, surface-mount hinges worn smooth at the knuckle.

The surface is the reason these are here. Beneath a later coat of black lay butter yellow, and beneath that chalk white, and beneath that a thin seam of pale aquamarine still visible in the panels. Every inch of that black was taken back by hand — scraper and steel wool, no chemical stripper, no sanding to bare wood — which is why it survives exactly where it earned the right to: in the open grain, banked along the panel shadows, caught in the moldings. What's left doesn't behave like a painted finish. Yellow comes forward in broad fields, white scrapes across it in short strokes, black runs the length of the grain in long gestural drags. From six feet away the doors read as canvases.

The sides were left quiet — a flat cream field with a soft charcoal edge — so the pair holds a wall without competing for it.

History & Provenance

Built into a private Reno residence in 1939 and never moved from it until this year. Everything about the construction is site-built and of its moment: softwood, frame-and-panel doors, fixed shelves, catalog hardware, an open back because no one was meant to see it.

The find came during the stripping. Working the black off one of the left-hand doors by hand, two decalcomanias surfaced intact — a kræmmerhus, the Danish cornucopia, and a small folk figure standing beneath it. The kræmmerhus is the folded paper cone filled with sweets and hung on the tree at Christmas, a Danish custom documented since the early nineteenth century and carried to America by Scandinavian households. Transfer decals of the motif were sold through the 1930s and '40s by makers like Meyercord and Duro, a few cents a sheet, and applied to exactly this kind of working cupboard. Almost none survived the next repaint. These did, buried under three coats, and they were left precisely as found — faded into the yellow, barely there, and all the better for it.

From the Hinchman Collection. Stripped and finished by hand by Walter Hinchman, 2026.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most abstract art in a room arrives framed and hung. This arrives holding your linens.

Run the two side by side and you have seven feet of storage that behaves like a single large-scale painting — enough presence to settle a room before a decorative object goes into it. Separate them and they flank a doorway, a fireplace, or a bed with the symmetry of built-ins and none of the commitment. The 12-inch depth is what makes them unusually usable: they take almost nothing from the floor, so they'll fit a hallway, a narrow pantry, or the wall behind a dining table where a full-depth cupboard would crowd the room. Six shelves between them is a serious amount of storage for that footprint.

The palette does quiet, generous work. Warm yellow and cream sit easily against white plaster, oak floors, and unbleached linen, and the black keeps the whole thing from tipping into soft or nostalgic. These aren't farmhouse. They're closer to a canvas that happens to have doors.

One care note worth passing along: the stripped paint is the finish, so it wants dusting rather than washing. A dry cloth, a little wax on the cornice if you want the sheen, and no wet cleaners or solvents on the door faces — the remaining black sits thin on the high points and will lift. The open backs allow these to hang from a French cleat or stand freely against a wall, whichever the room calls for.