An Outdoor Kitchen for River Cottage
Huckleberry × Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Just ten minutes down the road from our workshops, River Cottage has long championed many of the same things that matter to us at Huckleberry: provenance, local craftsmanship, natural materials and knowing where the things around us come from.​ So when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall approached us to create a new outdoor kitchen for River Cottage, it felt like a particularly fitting collaboration.

​

“We love local, we love good craftsmanship, we love celebrating the combination of things that are well made and great food, also locally sourced,” says Hugh.

​

This year marks the 20th anniversary of River Cottage at Park Farm in Devon. As part of the celebrations, the team are hosting Grill Nights – evenings centred around cooking outdoors over fire and making the most of the seasonal, locally sourced ingredients for which River Cottage is known.​ The new Huckleberry kitchen sits at the heart of this, on the deck outside the River Cottage kitchen.

​

Working with Hugh and the River Cottage team, we designed a substantial solid oak island with a blue lias worktop, incorporating a Somerset Grill, alongside a separate oak preparation table.

It is a working kitchen in every sense. It needed to give the River Cottage chefs plenty of room to prepare and cook, while being robust enough for a busy hospitality environment and capable of remaining outdoors throughout the seasons.

 

There is a pleasing honesty to the materials. The solidity of the oak, the weight of the limestone and the simplicity of the construction all feel particularly at home in the River Cottage landscape. Rather than being designed to remain pristine, these are materials that will weather and develop character through years of cooking, gathering and use.

​

“This has obviously been beautifully worked, and lovely solid pieces of wood that you know are going to last forever.”

​

Provenance has always been fundamental to River Cottage, most obviously in its approach to food. But for Hugh, that thinking extends beyond what is being cooked to the things River Cottage chooses to surround itself with.

​

“It matters a lot to me where food comes from, and actually where everything here at River Cottage comes from, because I think it gives us a fantastic connection with our community if we share food together, if we source food together.”

​​

We make our kitchens and furniture with the same belief in provenance: knowing the materials we work with, understanding how something has been made and creating pieces intended to remain useful and beautiful for many years.

​

“We know the Huckleberry team and their brilliant craftsmanship. They’re friends of River Cottage. So that just makes what we’re doing tonight feel special.”

​

For us, that makes this project particularly meaningful. It isn't simply a Huckleberry kitchen installed at River Cottage; it's a collaboration between two local businesses with a shared appreciation for craftsmanship, provenance and things made with care.

 

Outdoor cooking has an inherently social quality to it. The preparation, the fire and the cooking become part of the occasion rather than something happening behind closed doors. That feels especially appropriate at River Cottage, where food has always been about more than what arrives on the plate. It's about where ingredients come from, the people who produce them and the experience of gathering around a table to share them.

​

As River Cottage celebrates 20 years at Park Farm, we're delighted that a Huckleberry kitchen will become part of that story, made just down the road, built to work hard and, we hope, to be cooked around for many years to come.

​