Our Place: the cookware brand with a mission to make the kitchen toxin-free and culturally inclusive
Accept an invitation to the home of Shiza Shahid and her husband Amir Tehrani and you can be sure of a good meal – perhaps prepared using fresh ingredients from the farmer’s market just down the road from their LA house – but, admits Shadid, ‘I’m not one for too much small talk.’
After founding Our Place in 2019, with the help of fellow business partner Zach Rosner, the entrepreneurs have been busy turning their ‘Always Pans’ (£130) and ‘Perfect Pots’ (£140) (as well as tableware) into some of the most covetable pieces for today’s kitchens. It’s not just about the products though; for Shahid, the aim is to effect change. It’s no surprise she doesn’t have much time for idle chit-chat.
‘Ultimately, we believe that a business is just a set of decisions. The more times you choose to do a slightly kinder thing, whether that’s something as small as where you’re ordering lunch from or as big as donating over two million meals to food charities worldwide, it all adds up,’ says Shahid. For every new collection Our Place launches, she selects a charity to benefit, and her altruism began long before she founded her company.
Growing up in Islamabad, Pakistan, Shahid became a student activist and refugee-camp volunteer and, in 2013, after having moved to the USA to study, she quit her job to become co-founder of the Malala Fund with her friend, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai.
It’s an experience that has, no doubt, shown her the power people have to disrupt the status quo. And that’s just what she aims to do in the kitchen. Her first task was to make a stand against toxins.
Every Our Place pan features the brand’s own non-stick coating, made without any potentially toxic materials such as PFAS (the family of harmful compounds found in Teflon), PTFEs and PFOAs. ‘We believe that these chemicals should never have been in the kitchen,’ says Shahid, with obvious passion. As well as being beautiful and multifunctional, Our Place’s cookware (apart from its cast-iron range) is made from recycled aluminium taken from consumer waste rather than factory scraps.
Ultimately, Shahid wants to make cooking at home more fun and promote a culturally inclusive discussion around food. Having been kept out of the kitchen as a child by a mother who wanted her to concentrate on her studies, she moved to New York unable to recreate the tastes she associated with home. ‘This thing that she had initially done to empower me had become really disempowering,’ recalls Shahid, who now revels in telling the stories of other people’s food rituals with the ‘Traditionware’ collection – think rice bowls ready for Lunar New Year or stylish frying tools that can produce golden jalebi for Diwali.
For Shahid, tradition isn’t about upholding the past, or what she calls ‘our great-grandparents’ vision of culture’, it’s about honouring how practices can evolve and how that evolution can play out, at home, on people’s dinner tables. ‘Recently, I hosted an Eid party,’ Shahid tells us. ‘My table looked very different from how my parents’ would.’ fromourplace.co.uk
