Or plan to get one some day? It was a big thing with my parents, but I’ve never seen them in anyone else’s homes.
It is just one of those “Boomer” things nowadays?
We have something like that with glassware in it. Much of it is from our respective parents so there’s some sentimental / nostalgia value, but also we like cocktails and it’s fun having stuff in different types of glasses. None of it is particularly valuable, but glass doors makes it easier to find what you’re looking for and it more or less looks nice.
You call it China cabinet, I call it booze box.
Have no fancy plates, that shit is obsolete.
If I were going to host a fancy dinner, I would go to a restaurant.
Wtf good is China that you have to spend hours hand washing? I don’t have servants and I don’t have a dining room either. I mean I did, but I put a stereo in there instead. We used the dining room 3x a year. I listen to records every day.
Priorities.
I inherited most of my grandma’s mid-century dining room set, so yes. I keep her china in the bottom, and use the top as a display case and liquor cabinet. She wouldn’t exactly be thrilled with my setup, but she’d be happy the furniture stayed in the family.


ooo is that a 3D brain sliced up into coasters??
It’s printed on square glass, actually. I got it from ThinkGeek years ago.
Your knick knacks are pretty rad! Cool use of the china cabinet.
Thanks! My decor style falls solidly under maximalist, so it’s a pretty good representation of the rest of my house.
Yes, of course, where else am I gonna keep my china? Older millennial, for reference.
Uh, also live in a century home (1880), so there’s no closests or cupboards; the expectation is you’d have wardrobes and cabinets and other heavy storage furniture for that purpose instead of anything built-in.
(Speaking as an early Millennial)
I have a gigantic cabinet in my dining room/kitchen (not much wall between them so it’s kinda the same space). It’s 8 feet tall, solid hardwood except for the glass doors, and was originally a built-in from a house in the next neighborhood over. They put it out on the curb and I saw it, hitched up my utility trailer, brought it home and installed it. Best curb find so far.
I use it as a pantry because my house small and doesn’t have a closet-style pantry.
I also have a set of fine china that a friend gave me as a wedding present (even though we didn’t have a gift registry), but the pattern isn’t really our style and I’ve never taken it out of the box. I don’t have plans to buy other fancy dishes, either. I’m very happy with my cheap Corelle (except for the fact that they discontinued the pattern and I wish I had more sets of it).
So, technically, I “have” both china and a china cabinet, but it is very much just a Boomer thing anyway.
Used to until we moved. We left the china and the china cabinet behind. Only thing we took that was in it was my mom’s snow globe collection.
I wouldn’t bother getting another. I have no desire to have a set of fancy dining ware that gets used maybe once a year. The only fancy dining ware I need is anything not paper and plastic.
Having fancy china/dish sets for display isn’t really a thing the youth is worried about. It used be a social thing, having guests over to eat off (or just see the display) your fancy dinner plate is probably the social equivalent to having the box of 64GB of ram on a shelf above your computer. In other words “yes, we have money and you can shut about it up Aunt Gertrude”
A closed cabinet with glass doors to display what ever you collect is a nice thing to have. The doors help keep dust and cats out.
I have a nice display cabinet for all my pretty rocks. Got them really cheap at an epic hippie crystal joint. The store was full of stones. They’re not “jewellery grade”, but they still look great and people ask about them. Fuck yeah I love rocks.
I’m probably committing some spiritual crime by putting the citrine next to my amethyst and emerald. I didn’t memorise the instruction manual though.
Who even has people over at all these days?
My friend group has been making an effort to have a get-together at someone’s house once a month and we have been taking turns hosting. It’s been nice.
friend group
😐
and you can shut about it up Aunt Gertrude
This wording comes across in a very interesting way
Up yours, Gertrude! Er, I mean, up yer Gertrude! :)
You mean cabinets manufactured in China? Yeah, a whole kitchen full.
China is a pretty big country not sure how it would fit in a cabinet.
The US is a superpower and we still have a Cabinet. Make it work.
hahaha, this idiot hasn’t figured out country-folding. What a twat.
My parents (Gen x) have one that they got from my boomer grandma passing. They have a billion different sets of china they’re trying to sell or auction, but no one wants it. They’ve told me it’ll be mine when they pass and ugh. I appreciate that it’s nice and all, but truly I’ll probably just donate it to a rage room or something. A soup kitchen so they can all feel sophisticated. Dunno. I don’t want it.
I guess I had one or something like it when I first moved out. My parents gave it to me along with a matching dining table, all of which had been sitting in their basement. My wife wasn’t a fan of it and when we moved out of the house we listed it for sale, eventually selling it for a few hundred dollars, after sitting on the market for close to 2 months and dropping the price a few times.
My parents were upset when they found out; it turned out they had had that table custom made earlier in their marriage when they could finally afford new furniture. They said they would’ve bought it back for more than we got had they known. But a couple days later they begrudgingly realized they didn’t have room for that furniture and it wouldn’t have made sense for them to buy it.
A few years later they moved into a smaller home since all of us kids had been grown and moved out for years. As they tried to sell furniture and other things they weren’t going to have room for, it became depressing to them to see how little these things were worth that they had spent a lot of money on new. They had a set of china for each of us kids, one they bought or received as a wedding gift, others they had inherited from dead relatives. But it became apparent that we all preferred the same set, the one with the simplest design, yet it also was clear that we would only rarely, if ever, use the china and it’s largely a waste of space for any of us.
I think we might even have our set already, but we never use it and it’s not on display. If we have it it’s in the bottom cabinets of a console my wife loves. Also there are a couple very nice crystal bowls my uncle bought us, that my wife is almost terrified to get out of their box out of fear of breaking them. We understand they’re all nice items and expensive, but we might’ve preferred to have that money spent on things we’d get more use out of.
terrified to get out of their box out of fear of breaking them.
The question you have to ask is: Is it worth taking up space and never beeing seen or used vs. the risk of having it out and using it?
It’s like bottles of wine that slowly turn to vinegar. Things not used are a waste of space, a waste of resources spent on making them.
It’s your stuff, do as you please, of course. I don’tk now enough specifics to say either use or don’t use is better for sure. Just that most people hoard and hold on to things that never get used. Like the china in the thread and your comment specifically - what a waste of space, although at least using it annually means it’s really special. But compare that to something you can never use - it only takes up space.
Again, not trying to be pushy at all, I know it might sound it <3
My mom still has all of her mom’s old china from when she passed. It fills up an enormous, ugly, heavy cabinet that eats up a pretty significant chunk of the living room and doesn’t go with any of the other decor. I have never, in my nearly 40 years of existence, seen her use a single piece of it. It was always “for special occasions”, but we always went out for special occasions, so they still never got used.
I think she only keeps them because they were important to her mom, who inherited some of it from her mom, and possibly even further up the chain. I don’t think they’re even worth anything; she could maybe get a couple hundred bucks if she were to sell the whole collection, maybe a bit more if she got creative with the listing. There were times growing up where we were dirt broke and couldn’t even afford soap to wash a dish and ate dinner off of paper towels, and she still wouldn’t let anyone use the china. But it was important to those before her, so I think my mom just wants to preserve it in their memory.
Nope. I think it’s mostly a dead idea.
My mom is still hoarding (for me) a set of fine china dishes I inherited from my grandmother. They’re really nice.
But what am I going to do with them? Add specific furniture to my too-small home to store them so I can pull them out for certain dinner parties? We barely host for dinner anymore, and when we do, we keep it casual.
I think china cabinets go along with a whole bunch of social niceties that were important in the 20th century and have since withered.
Puling out the fine china for a gathering used to be a big deal. Nowadays, gatherings are less common, the cachet of owning a set of fine china is less, and when we do gather, many probably use paper plates and the like for easier cleanup.
The act of cooking for guests is considered sufficient effort, I think. And we typically value other posessions more - may I even suggest that most people already have too much stuff, so instead of a sparse house and tales of people holding on to string from packages and that string proving valuable (a tale I remember reading in a childhood schoolbook), today we have too much stuff.
No. I do not.










