Turning a Bar Cart Into a Coffee and Tea Station

Nobody in my house drinks enough cocktails to justify a bar cart. Coffee and tea, though, we go through constantly. So the cart became that instead, and it gets used every single morning rather than twice a year.

The Pottery Barn Everson is the cart. Two levels, which is what you need, because the top is for the things you use daily and the bottom is for the backup supply nobody should have to look at.

The Williams Sonoma honeycomb tea set is the piece the rest is built around. I’ve used their honeycomb pieces for a while now and they photograph beautifully, which sounds like a shallow reason to buy something until you realize you look at this corner every morning.

The matching honeycomb mug means the cart reads as one thing rather than a collection of leftovers. Buy more than one. Guests exist.

Metal breaks up ceramic. The CB2 Leclaire stainless serving tray corrals the mugs and gives you a surface you can lift and carry to another room, which is more useful than it sounds when someone’s still in bed.

Then the small glass. The CB2 Gianna dishes with lids hold sugar, tea bags, sweetener, whatever you’d otherwise leave in a torn cardboard box. I’m linking the extra small on its own and the set of two, so pick based on how many things you need to hide.

The reason this works better than a coffee bar built into a kitchen counter is that a cart moves. Ours goes onto the patio in November and back inside in March.

If you’re building it slowly, get the cart and the tray first. Everything else can be things you already own until you replace them.