Green and bear it

Putting up with a green kitchen for 26 years is a test of endurance.

When I first arrived in Malaysia in 1982, my then husband met me at Penang’s International Airport and drove me to the house that I would live in for more than 25 years. Coming from the relative cold of Scotland where houses are sealed tight against the elements most of the year, I fell in love with my new house’s airy, open plan. Everything was perfect. Well, almost everything.

You see, my kitchen was designed with several hideous shades of green. There were green tiles on the floor, a large green fridge in one corner, and green, Formica-veneered cupboards clinging to two of the walls. The previous owner had obviously had a penchant for the colour.

Green has never been a favourite colour of mine. Indeed, if you were to look inside my wardrobe, you would only find an emerald green scarf as a passing nod at the colour. Even then, this purchase was a must-have for a St Patrick’s Day celebration.

Although I can appreciate the practicalities of Formica, I’d rather not encounter it in a shade of unattractive green every morning upon getting out of bed. I actually looked up my Formica on a colour chart, and the shade it most resembles is called “olive drab”. Like, who in their right mind goes to the trouble and expense of installing a fitted kitchen only to choose a colour with a name that tells you how hideous it is?

Even someone who has no sense of colour coordination would be able to tell you that the word “drab” is something you want to steer clear of. That and dirty brown, shades of bile and seasick green. Still, for all its hideousness, my kitchen was in pristine condition all those years ago.

And since I was just newly wed and on a tight budget at the time, I decided to turn a blind eye to the sheer dreadfulness of it all. Actually, the only way to view that kitchen would have been with two blind eyes.

Whenever members of my family came to visit me in my new home for the first time, they would usually survey the huge expanse of green at the rear of my house and say something like, “Ooh! This is interesting.” One of my sisters, who has a house that looks as if it has come straight out of the pages of Perfect Homes, began twitching ever so slightly when she saw it for the first time. Upon her return to the UK, she sent me enough interior design magazines to sink the Titanic.

Even when I had the means to change my kitchen, I never did anything about it. Probably because I never really felt it was mine to call my own.

You see, during the early years of my marriage, my in-laws would often come to stay with me for months at a time, bringing with them cooking paraphernalia from an Asian kitchen that needed to find temporary housing. My late mother-in-law would settle in with her clay pots, and jars and bottles of unfamiliar-looking ingredients, and I would quietly retreat from the kitchen and leave her to her newly staked claim.

Some years later, after the birth of my second child, another woman came to stake her own claim: my Indonesian maid, who came for two years and ended up staying for 16.

When my green fridge began wheezing and blowing hot and cold a few years back, I replaced it with cool, neutral white number. In the meantime, my cupboards had morphed into an eyesore, with their veneers beginning to curl at the edges.

I would periodically glue them back into place, but even the strongest adhesive was no permanent match for that wayward Formica. It was only when my maid returned to Indonesia a few months back, that I seriously began thinking about replacing those cupboards.

Now that I was spending more time in the kitchen, the flaws that my maid had quietly tolerated had quickly become intolerable to me. As I write this, I’m having new kitchen cupboards built in a shade of beech that reminds me of warm honey.

My green Formica cupboards have been ripped out, leaving behind a large empty space that harbours no regrets.

As for my green floor tiles, they’ve actually grown on me over the years. I checked them on the colour chart, and the shade they most resemble is called “moss green”.