Our Place Co-Founder Shiza Shahid's LA Home Is an Entertainer's Paradise (Of Course)

T here’s a quote by the prolific author Michael Pollan which suggests that a shared meal elevates eating from a simple fuelling process “to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture”. This notion – that breaking bread with others equates to a cultural exercise – lies at the very heart of Shiza Shahid’s high-end kitchenware company, Our Place.

The entrepreneur and activist relocated from her native Pakistan on a scholarship to study at Stanford at the age of 18, and would go on to co-found the Malala Fund alongside Malala Yousafzai, fighting to help girls in vulnerable communities gain access to education. In 2019, she began her next chapter with the debut of the Always Pan; a “10-in-1” nonstick, never toxic pan that catapulted her and her husband’s new brand to cult-favourite status, amassing waitlists in the thousands and picking up a few notable fans, including Oprah, Cameron Diaz, and Selena Gomez.

But it wasn’t just about the pan. Our Place entered the market with a mission to celebrate different cultures over the act of cooking and sharing food. “My husband and I are both immigrants and we found our place in America by cooking food and having people come to our dinner table,” Shiza says, adding that for the two of them, it’s “about reconnecting to our bodies, our cultures, our food systems, our identities, our traditions, and to each other”. When they realised there wasn’t an inclusive kitchenware brand that celebrated all of this, the idea for Our Place quickly snapped into focus.

Since 2019, Shahid has expanded the brand’s offerings to include appliances such as the Wonder Oven (a 6-in-1 air fryer and toaster oven), a powerful blender, ceramic tableware and glassware, versatile bakeware, and a useful edit of kitchen tools – designed in Our Place’s signature cheery colour palettes. There’s even a collection of Traditionware™ that honours specific celebrations and cultures, such as their Tagine handcrafted by artisans in Morocco and the Golden Fry Set designed for Diwali festivities.

Shiza is now based in Los Angeles a couple of miles from the beach where she and her husband live in a Spanish style home they stumbled upon on a neighbourhood walk together. “It has really good bones, really good energy, a lot of warmth,” she says. Some of her favourite architectural details speak to these soulful sentiments, from the Spanish tiles to the warm wood accents.

Unsurprisingly, the kitchen is the beating heart of Shiza’s home. “In our kitchen, you always feel like you’re connected to other spaces of the house like the dining area and living room,” she shares. The kitchen is awash in a bold blue hue (a detail Shiza says they inherited from the previous owners and wanted to keep), with note-perfect details she customised such as the artful bar stools and elegant light fixtures.

“We wanted the design of our house to feel like you're seeing sort of the breadth of who we are and how we've lived,” she says, nodding to a balance between feeling expansive and clean but never boring or sterile. “It is very open and there are a lot of light, neutral colours, but then there are also these objects that have a lot of character and colour and texture,” she says. “So it's kind of that juxtaposition between interesting, fun, unexpected, surprising – and also calming, open, expansive, and peaceful – that we try to strike within our home”.

In a similar spirit, this is precisely how Shiza approaches the design for the Our Place collection. “We want products that inspire joy, that inspire creativity, that take an everyday act, which can sometimes feel mundane, and infuse it with a little more play and a sense that ‘I’m making this for someone I love, with my hands, and finding beauty and purpose in cooking”.

Unsurprisingly, one of her favourite things to do is host dinner parties at home – with the aid of her Bed Threads table linens, of course. “I love the beautiful cream tablecloth and the scalloped mats”, she says, adding that they lend a playful touch to a long dinner table. “You don't even need to bother about getting flowers and candles if you’re short on time, the mats already add so much personality”.

When planning a dinner party, she is mindful to curate a diverse mix of guests. “Making sure that it's people who will enjoy meeting each other and hearing each other’s ideas, if they're meeting for the first time," she says, pointing to Our Place’s game called Let’s Dig In, which fosters deeper connections at the dinner table. “So often we'll gather really interesting voices from different fields and interests and backgrounds. I love a good dinner conversation prompt”.

For more from Shiza, follow her @shiza & @ourplace