Rachael Ray Cooks Up A Batch Of Furniture

Just like her dishes, the celebrity chef’s home collection is simple, practical and affordable.

- Robert Klara

Ten hours into one of her 19-hour days, Rachael Ray has just wrapped up a late-afternoon taping of the syndicated cooking show that bears her name. For the last hour, she has calmly presided over a stove top full of simmering pots, assembling a nine-layer chicken burrito while guest chef Ryan Scott made five different dishes from a single recipe for biscuits. But now, as the studio audience files out and the lighting guys coil the cables, Ray doesn’t want to talk about food. Instead, the topic is furniture, the furniture for sale in stores—and, specifically, what she doesn’t like about it. Among the offenses: The stuff is too expensive, uncomfortable, pretentious and, most egregious of all, there’s never any place to store wine.

“Everybody drinks wine, you know,” Ray said, “not just rich people. And there’s never a consideration for that in affordable furniture.”

But it’s not like Ray to complain about a problem without trying to do something about it—and, in the instance of furniture, she has. This summer, Ray announced the Rachael Ray Home Collection, a line of 130 pieces for the bedroom, living room, dining room and kitchen. Two years in the planning, the line is just now completing its rollout to retail stores nationally.

Ray is no stranger to extensions of her brand (see box), which already includes cookbooks, a magazine, a line of cookware and her own brand of dog and cat food. But the message Ray wants to send about her latest product line isn’t just that it’s practical, stylish and reasonably priced, it’s that she designed it herself.