7 Standout Uses for Your Wood Serving Tray

Most serving trays live in a cupboard eleven months of the year and come out for the holidays. That is a waste of a good tray, especially a wood map serving tray carved to the real bathymetry of a coast you love. A tray that looks like a framed chart does not belong in storage. It belongs out in the room, doing something. Here are seven ways to keep yours working, from the dining table to the nightstand.

1. Build a centerpiece on it

A tray gives a table a defined stage. Set one down the middle of the dining table and it corrals whatever you arrange on it into a single deliberate group instead of scattered objects. Candlesticks, a low bowl, a couple of small found things, a sprig of greenery: on bare wood they read as clutter, but inside the raised edge of a tray they read as a composition.

Start with a tray that carries some meaning. A San Francisco Bay tray, with the water around the Golden Gate cut to its true depth, does double duty: it holds the centerpiece and it is the centerpiece. Guests pick a place they recognize off the map before anyone touches the food, and the table has its first conversation started for it.

2. Serve breakfast in bed

This is the tray's oldest job, and it still holds up. A wood tray has the flat, rigid base and the raised lip you actually want for carrying a full plate, a mug, and a glass across a house without a spill. Wood also stays cool to the hand where metal picks up the heat off a plate.

Keep the load honest. Eggs and toast, coffee or a mimosa, a single flower in a small vase so the tray does not tip. A 20 by 13 inch tray comfortably takes a plate, a mug, and a folded napkin with room to spare. Wipe it dry after, the same as any good cutting board, and it will outlast a decade of Sunday mornings.

3. Make it the catch-all by the door

Every house has a spot where keys, sunglasses, loose change, and the mail collect. Left to itself that spot turns into a pile. Give it a tray and the same objects become a tidy landing zone, contained and easy to scan on your way out the door.

The trick is one tray per spot, sized to the job:

• A tray on the nightstand for the contents of your pockets, plus a watch and reading glasses.
• A tray by the front door for keys, wallet, and the day's mail.
• A tray on the bathroom counter to keep creams, a razor, and small bottles from wandering.
• A tray on the desk for the things that have to go home at the end of the day.

Because a map tray is good-looking on its own, the catch-all stops looking like a catch-all and starts looking intentional.

4. Anchor the coffee table

A coffee table collects remotes, coasters, a book, a candle. A tray pulls all of it into one rectangle you can lift off in a second when you need the surface back. Designers lean on this move because it makes a busy table look composed without asking anyone to put anything away.

Style around whatever the tray is holding. A Manhattan tray, with the island and its rivers carved in relief, takes well to a stack of small books, a Playbill from a show you saw, and a candle. The map gives the arrangement a subject, so it feels like a small still life rather than a pile of remotes.

5. Hang it on the wall

A wood map tray is a relief carving before it is anything else. The land sits proud of the water, the channels drop away, and under a bit of light the whole surface throws real shadow. That is worth seeing, and a tray spends most of its life lying flat where you look straight down on it. Put it upright on a wall and the relief finally reads.

One tray can hang as a single statement piece. Several together make a gallery wall of the coasts and lakes that matter to you: the bay you grew up on, the lake the family cabin sits on, the harbor where you learned to sail. If you want to understand what you are looking at, our guide to how our 3D wood maps are made walks through the carving, staining, and finishing behind every tray.

6. Set up a bar cart or drinks station

A good home bar is worth looking at: clear glass, a heavy bottle or two, a shaker with some weight to it. Locked in a cabinet, none of that does any work for the room. On a tray, it becomes a station, and the raised edge does a practical thing too, catching drips and keeping rings off the furniture underneath.

Set it for the occasion. A shaker and a pair of coupes for cocktails, or flutes and an ice bucket when there is something to celebrate. A New Orleans tray under a bottle of rye reads like a small tribute to the city that arguably invented the American cocktail. A tray set up this way also makes an easy gift for the mixologist in your life.

7. Grow a small indoor herb garden

Fresh basil, mint, and chives a few steps from the stove change the way you cook, and a tray keeps the whole operation off your counter. Group three or four small pots on one tray and it catches the stray soil and the runoff from watering, so a windowsill garden does not turn into a mess to wipe up every day.

Herbs that do well in a pot on a bright kitchen sill:

• Basil, which wants the most sun of the group.
• Chives, nearly impossible to kill.
• Mint, best kept in its own pot so it does not crowd out the rest.
• Cilantro, quick to grow and quick to bolt, so resow it often.
• Lavender, more for the scent than the kitchen, but it earns its place.

Seal the tray well or slip a saucer under each pot, since standing water is the one thing wood does not love. Handled that way, the same tray that serves brunch on Sunday grows the garnish for it the rest of the week.

One tray, seven jobs

A wood map serving tray is built to carry food, and it does that well. What makes it worth keeping out is everything else it does between meals: staging a centerpiece, taming the clutter by the door, hanging as a relief map, holding the bar, growing the herbs. Pick the water that means something to you and the tray earns its keep in every room you put it in.

Find your coast, lake, or harbor in the full serving tray collection, or start with the Woodchart best sellers and see which map you can't put back in the cupboard.