Found: 1963 aqua Geneva steel kitchen cabinets – from a cooking school run by nuns in NYC!

The is the original home of the steel kitchen cabinets I’d been searching for, for nearly 5 years. The decorating gods sent them to me, just as I needed to lock in a decision about my cabinets. I’d just about given up hope of finding the vintage steel kitchen cabinets I wanted — hard to find a set large enough to fit my 15×15 kitchen, and they had to be geographically near. But these came to me just in time — and in aqua — the color my husband wanted — 67 of them — plenty to work with — and in great shape. They are from The Grace Institute, a not-for-profit on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and had been installed in 1963. Nuns ran the institute at the time, and these filled two rooms used to teach cooking to women in need. Today, the rooms are used to teach ESL classes (in progress when I initially visited to scope out the cabinets, pictured.) The nuns took great care of them. I’m told they were only used for seven or eight years. Note the dymo labels they put on to keep track of the cabinets’ contents. I wanted to keep these on, but my husband’s patience stopped there. The fastidious nuns also labeled the inside.